Supply Chain Management (SCM)
Background:
You have been promoted to senior analyst in the Distribution Engineering, Maintenance, and Productions Management group of the Central Engineering Department of the Canbide Corporation. At this location is a facility for the electronics business. Based upon your previous successes in the electronics division, you will now spend most of your time with the chemical plants. The Canbide Corporation is a U.S.-based, multi-national, publicly traded, manufacturing company with annual sales nearing $10 billion. Canbide is one of the pioneers of the petrochemical industry and is the acknowledged technology leader in several market sectors, and benefits from large licensing royalty checks for those technologies. Canbide is the low cost producer for a number of commodity products. Canbide's current marketing approach is based on providing a wide selection of products from a single location, more than any of their competitors. Mr. Villani, president of the Chemicals Business Group, is pressing his divisional VPs to solve several problems. There are customer service problems at most of the distribution locations, but especially at a facility near Denver, CO. There are inventory and materials handling problems at the production facility near Huntsville, AL.
Scenario: Supply Chain Management (SCM) has been a popular buzzword since the mid 1990s, and has had many variations of definition by many experts. It's now buzzed over to Canbide and is the topic of debate at the weekly analysts' meeting.
Question: What is your definition of Supply Chain Management?