Supply Chain Management

Good supply chains aren’t always dynamic. Supply chains for businesses with unique products are very different from supply chains for businesses based on unique processes. The two approaches can’t coexist. In fact, some business models thrive on efficient, not dynamic, supply chains.

While the early B2B internet platforms served as e-procurement tools supporting mainly short term relationships and aiming to reduce the transaction costs in the procurement of non-production items, the new wave of marketplaces acquire their economic value through a widened scope of services and the support of collaboration and synchronization between organizations.

The SCM concept also has been subject to evolution since its beginning. Though the estimation, it is not clear what exactly SCM is [Kotzab/Schnedlitz 1999], we can state that the focus of this concept goes more and more beyond the optimization of the processes within the boundaries of a single company towards a holistic view of the supply chain. Modern models and standards for SCM are dedicated to consider whole value chains and many-to-many relationships. Thus, the supply chain is no more seen as a sequential concatenation of suppliers and customers but as an entity itself.