Sample Essay
In the competitive world today it is highly imperative that customer delight is maintained by providing customized products characterized by timely delivery (Jespersen and Larsen 9). Therefore, with changing times, we witness the shift from focus on tough competition between firms in an industry to a focus on competition of supply chain management; it is thus a war of supply chains. Companies or even retailers for that matter need to lay more stress on markets where demand patterns change quickly, where there are many customer relationship groups and market segments and where product augmentation is essential, to be more precise, it is where customers focus on experiences as compared to the mere physical products.
Supply chain management should be dealt with great caution starting from B2B customers to both B2C. Similarly, at times it’s best when related activity should be tackled by not solely your own business. This is the reason why third party logistics become useful. A third party logistics provider abbreviated as 3PL, is a company responsible for managing operations and logistics for another company (Blanchard 193).
Furthermore, consumer demand plays a crucial role and shaping the supply chain for business around the world. Whether it should be based on a push strategy or a pull strategy is all dependent on the rationality and need of the target market. Thus, push processes are devised in pursuit of desired consumer demand, whereas, a pull process along the lines of supply chain is devised as a response to consumer demand (Chopra 223). For the latter the capacity and inventory levels need to be well managed while for the former, production and transportation need to be well planned. Thus, various demand forecasting strategies have been devised to study changing and required demand patterns up till date.
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