Supply Chain Management is the crucial business discipline to be followed for an organization to succeed in the present competitive world.

Student 1: Prudhviraj

Introduction

A distinguishing characteristic of successful supply chains is the ability to achieve “alignment” between people, processes, and technologies that are essential to the planning and operational aspects of supply chains. Performance measurement for logistics systems and, especially, for supply chains is necessary but challenging because of their complexity and scope. Important guidelines for metric development for logistics and supply chains include consistency with corporate strategy, focus on customer needs, careful selection and prioritization of metrics, focus on processes, use of a balanced approach, and use of technology to improve measurement effectiveness (Coyle, Langley, Novack, & Gibson, 2016, p. 479, 541).

Question 1

Supply Chain Management is the crucial business discipline to be followed for an organization to succeed in the present competitive world. There are several elements those contribute to the success of Supply Chain Management such as alignment, relationships, and collaboration. Alignment refers to a commonality of functionality and purpose that reinforces accomplishment of supply chain goals and objectives. Three example types of alignment are highly relevant to supply chain management. One is Supply Chain and organizational strategies. An organization’s success depends on the alignment, which is maintained in between procedures, plans, and functions with the Supply chain management of the organization. This helps an organization to reach its desired goals and objectives. Second example is supply and demand. An alignment between supply and demand in any organization would analyze the productivity of the organization to the customer’s satisfaction. It helps an organization to analyze whether its functions are to the optimum to meet the demand of its customers. Third example is supply chain and trading partners. A crucial aspect in any organization is to maintain alignment among itself, suppliers, trade partners, and customers. This enables an organization to improve its efficiency by reducing time complexity, and to gain customer’s satisfaction. Coming to Relationships, an effective supply chain management can be carried out through the coordination between the participating organizations like customers, logistics suppliers, and partners of the organization. A process model was developed and implemented in supply chain management to maintain relationship among the partners of the organization. The model comprises of several steps to build a logistic relationship and avail logistic services such as transportation, warehouse, and many more. Coming to Collaboration, Collaboration is said to be in any organization when there is an effective sharing of information and resources through alignment and relationship. Several elements of collaboration are trust, sharing gains and losses, comprehensible goals, and many more (Coyle, Langley, Novack, & Gibson, 2016, p. 479-487).

Question 2

Supply chain relationship plays a vital role in transporting the goods from one place to another. Supply chain relationships are divided into two parts including vertical relationships and horizontal relationships. Vertical relationships include the traditional linkages between various firms of a supply chain. These relationships help in achieving the objectives of individual firm and the entire supply chain. Besides this, it also includes logistics service providers who attend their customers in the vertical style of relationship. Main participants in vertical relationships include the manufacturers, distributors, retailers and customers. Horizontal relationships refer to the business agreements between the firms that holds cooperating or parallel positions in the logistics process. It includes a service agreement between two or more providers, on the basis of cooperation, trust and shared risk (Coyle, Langley, Novack, & Gibson, 2016, p. 482-484).

Question 3

Employees suggest the key productivity factors that should be included in the performance metrics. Employees also help in the development of performance bar. Cost, time, quality and other factors that determine the performance are accurately stated by employees. Employees also determine the factors that should be focused and factors that should be given less importance while evaluating the performance. Role of employees in the development of performance metrics is important as it gives them the sense of responsiveness and hence, results in better job performance. It also helps the organization to increase the motivation level of employees and hence, reduce the employee turnover. Thus, employees play an important role in the development of performance metric which helps in the achievement of organization objectives efficiently and effectively (Coyle, Langley, Novack, & Gibson, 2016, p. 511-514).

Conclusion

Performance measurements are central to improving organizational competitiveness. Organizations and researchers have developed and investigated various performance measurement systems to manage and improve internal and external operations for logistics and supply chains. Performance measurement has many uses, including the determination of the efficiency and effectiveness of an existing system, benchmarking through comparison of competing alternative systems, and data acquisition for strategic planning. Overall, performance measurement is typically used to plan, design, implement, and monitor proposed systems. Performance measurement has recently expanded to the supply chain owing to the increased complexities of multiple processes and organizations that may be involved in product and service delivery and the role of supply chain relationships and processes in managing organization strategic advantages (Bai, Sarkis, 2012, p. 2484-2500).

References

Coyle, J. J., Langley, C. J., Novack, R. A., & Gibson, B. J. (2016). Supply Chain Management:

A Logistics Perspective (10th ed.). New York: Cengage South-Western.

Bai, C., & Sarkis, J. (2012. May). Supply-chain performance-measurement system management using neighbourhood rough sets. International Journal of Production Research,

50, 9, 2484-2500.