Managing Supply Chain Inventory : Pitfalls And Opportunities By Hau L. Lee And Corey Billington

Introduction

The article that I choose is called “Managing Supply Chain Inventory: Pitfalls and Opportunities” by Hau L. Lee and Corey Billington. This article was published by MITSloan, Management review, and it caught my attention because it explains indebt what most companies do in order to turn raw materials into intermediate and finished product. Along the way it also explains the pitfalls the supply chain management has that managers often don’t realize.

Summary

As mentioned above, this article deals with the common pitfalls supply chain management deals with in terms of information and operational problems. The first problems we see are based on communication between sites. The pitfalls that communication creates are not having a metrics for the supply chain, insufficient knowledge about the meaning of customer service, incorrect information about the delivery method, and not enough information regarding the databases used among companies.

Not having a supply chain metrics brings conflicts to the overall supply chain routine because companies that have different sites, do things in different ways and often have different goals to accomplish. The problem with this is that when different sites work under the same supply chain but have different objectives, it creates inefficiencies for the entire chain. This goes hand in hand with not having sufficient information about customer service.

Not knowing how important customer service is to the company and how to quickly respond when questions about delivery arise can hurt the supply chain of the company. Customer is becoming an important factor of the everyday business, therefore, knowing how to deal answer questions about delivery methods is important. Most of the time is...

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...dge and are better prepared when the situations happen. Also, this article helps with the understanding of needs of the stakeholders that are affected by the supply chain management. When we have a better understanding about a specific topic, it’s easier to come up with solutions to the specific targets or operating departments.

This article adds value to the class by going into detail and providing examples of every pitfall the supply chain management can encounter, by doing so, it makes it easier to understand and visually how the supply chain management works. The supply chain management has various parts to it, and it can be hard to understand, but after reading this article and having so many different examples of situations, I see all the opportunities that come from pitfalls and I am aware of all the problems that can happen in order to avoid making them.