Importance Of Demand Chain Management

3. Demand Chain Management, another way of achieving competitiveness

The challenges of today’s companies are to find the right balance between the management of their processes within the supply chain and meeting the expectancies of their customers, i.e. customer satisfaction. However, the latter will be only available if all the components of the supply chain will lead towards this customer satisfaction, and not only process optimization and effectiveness-research. Companies had yet to shift towards a solely customer-oriented process, however by doing so it definitely brings what we can call Demand Chain Management. Indeed, the emphasis is now on the needs of the market instead of the manufacturers’ needs. In this case, the supplier itself has to also adapt to the needs of the demand. This is why an often forgotten side that is marketing has also to be implemented in the process.

3.1. Demand Management

Let’s aim towards Demand Management first. After all, the Demand Management is a process that aims to forecast a

Anning et al., (2013) state that Demand Chain Management also is a tool to maximize stakeholder’s value by including all of the previously stated elements: cooperation, trust, supply and demand processes. They imply that CRM and DCM are tools that need to be integrated altogether. However, they do not focus on how it should be done. Some leads are given by Jüttner et al, (2007).

Demand Chain Management could also be seen as quite hard to implement because of its complexity for different kinds of markets and products. Indeed, several demand chain structures are necessary to adapt to varying customer needs and situations (Anning et al., 2013), it requires building a product structure, which would be too costly for companies that have a too important number of products and market segmentations, for now. However, the latter is hereby and logically not applicable in a service