Nt1330 Unit 1

Answer 2:-

A supply chain is a quality network of manufacturers, suppliers ,distributors, warehouses and retailers who by planned and coordinated activities develop products by converting raw materials to finished goods.

Supply chain management is connected with the flow of products and information between supply chain members and organizations. New development in technologies enables organization to get correct information easily in their premises. Technologies used are helpful in coordinating the activities which manage the supply chain. By this the cost of information is decreased because now we have increasing rate of technologies. In an integrated supply chain where product or raw material and information flow in a bi-directional we as managers needs to understand that information technology is more than just computers.

Few decades back the information flow between functional areas within organization and between supply chain members were totally paper based.

This paper based focused transaction and communication was very slow. Information was over looked as a critical competitive resource during this period, because its high value to supply chain members was not clearly understood back then.

IT infrastructure provides a competitive positioning towards business initiatives like implementation, cycle time reduction. Several well know organizations to us now that are involved in supply chain relationships with the help of information technology have ripe huge gain through integration of both.

Three factors that make information system important in supply chain of an organization are:-

1) Satisfying and pleasing customers have become something of a corporate obsession. Customer is served in the best, effective and most efficient manner and this practice has become critical.

2) IT helps manager to reduce inventory and human resource requirement to a competitive level in market.

3) IT helps to play a crucial role in strategic planning.

Application of IT in

retail:-
Electronic Commerce: This therefore includes electronic data interchange through e-mail, electronic publishing, , electronic bulletin boards, electronic fund transfers, image processing shared databases. Companies are now able to automate the process of moving documents electronically between customer and supplier.

Electronic Data Interchange: EDI refers to computer-to-computer exchange of business documents in a set format. EDI helps in communicating information between two organizations electronically instead of traditionally used mail, fax & courier. The benefits of EDI are:
- Competitive advantage.
- Increased productivity.
- Reduced paper work.
- Better customer service
- Improved billing.
- Cost efficiency.
- Quick process to information.
- Improved tracing and expediting.

Bar coding and Scanner: Bar code scanners are most visible to us in the check out counter of retail super markets. This code helps us to locate name of product and its manufacturer. Other applications of bar code scanner are tracking the moving items such as automobiles in assembly plants or components in PC assembly operations.
Data warehouse: Data warehouse is a consolidated data maintained different from an organization production system database. Many organizations have their multiple databases. A data warehouse is not all organized around specific business processes but on informational subjects. Data stored at data warehouses are time dependent and historical data might also be aggregated.
Enterprise Resource planning (ERP) tools: ERP system have become acceptable worldwide which capture the data and reduce the manual work activities and task interlinked with processing inventory, financial, and customer order information. ERP system helps in achieving a high level of integration by utilizing a single data mode and developing a common understanding about what the shared data represents. It also establishing a set of rules for accessing data.