Essay On Supply Chain Management

Supply chain management is the management of the flow of goods. It consists of the movement and storage of raw materials, inventory, and finished products from the point of origin to the point of consumption. It has been defined as the "design, planning, execution, control, and monitoring of supply chain activities with the objective of creating net value, building a competitive infrastructure, leveraging worldwide logistics, synchronizing supply with demand and measuring performance globally." Supply chain management has strategic implications for any company, identifying the required performance measures on most of the criteria is essential and it should be an integral part of any business strategy . Thus, the food supply chain and its management as essential to the agriculture and food industry and the market.

2.2 Business Process of a Food Supply Chain

As mentioned before, the food supply chain includes food production, processing, distribution, consumption and disposal. A wide diversity of products and companies operate in different markets and sell a variety of food products. The input suppliers/service providers offer seeds of various crops (raw materials) for the primary food producers (farmers) to produce crops. Then the transporters ship the crops to the packing/storage facilities, and the food processors (manufacturing) make the crops into different types of food products and sell them to wholesalers/retailers (distribution). Finally, the consumers purchase the food products from the wholesalers/retailers。

2.3 Global Food Supply Chains

Although the increased movement by consumers and grocers is to “buy local,” the food supply chain is becoming progressively mor...

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... such as the Kraft Foods, Thailand Frozen Food Industry, and Australian beef supply chain, etc. In the book Quantifying the Agri-Food Supply Chain, it describes “this model (Balanced Scorecard) employs performance metrics from financial (e.g., cost of manufacturing and cost of warehousing), customer (e.g., on-time delivery and order fill rate), business process (e.g., manufacturing adherence-to-plan), innovation and technology perspective (e.g., new-product development cycle time). By combining these different perspectives, the Balanced Scorecard helps a manager to understand the interrelationships and trade-offs between alternative performance metrics and leads to improved decision making.” The Balanced Scorecard is more tactical and strategically oriented compared with other models used in the food supply chain, mainly because it is an operation-oriented method.