Supply Chain Management

Running head: SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
Supply Chain Management
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1SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
Executive Summary
This report intends to shed light on the strategy of time-based competition and the manner in
which it had not only improved the supply chain systems used by the different organizations
but at the same time had enabled them to attain a higher growth rate as well. The report
begins by offering an overview of the strategy of time-based competition and also the likely
benefits that the use of it is likely to offer to the organizations. The report next discusses the
key elements of successful supply chains and also the concepts of ‘face to market’ and ‘face
to product’. The report next undertakes an analysis of the manner in which these concepts are
being used by the organization Wilmar International. The report finally concludes with a
discussion of the benefits that the usage of this strategy had offered to the organization under
discussion here.

2SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
Table of Contents
Time-based competition.............................................................................................................3
Key elements of successful supply chains.................................................................................3
Fast to Market............................................................................................................................5
Fast to Product............................................................................................................................5
Implementation..........................................................................................................................6
Wilmar International and its use of time-based competition.....................................................7
Effectiveness of the strategy for the organization......................................................................9
References................................................................................................................................10

3SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
Time-based competition
The concept of time-based competition was first articulated by George Stalk, Jr, in
this 1988 article “Time-The Next Source of Competitive Advantage” which first appeared in
the journal Harvard Business Review (Walker 2016). Chen, Preston and Swink (2015) have
articulated the viewpoint that the time base competition can be seen as a broad competitive
strategy which is intended to help the organizations to attain competitive advantage over the
rivals through the improvement of the supply chain system that they are using. More
importantly, as opined by Kozlenkova et al. (2015), the primary focus of the strategy under
discussion here is on the entity of time and thus the strategy states focuses on the effective
utilization as well as the management of time as a way to achieve sustainable competitive
advantage.
According to Christopher (2016), the evolution of this strategy can be seen as the time
as well as delivery related problems that the different business enterprises had been facing
since the traditional times. For example, the entity of time forms an integral part of the
business process of an organization and as a matter of fact the overall business as well as
financial prospects of an organization depend significantly on the speed with which it is being
able to manufacture quality products or services and also deliver it to the customers (Liu et al.
2016). However, since the traditional times, the organizations because of their reliance of the
manual supply chain systems used to lose out on a large number of customers because of the
delay in the manufacturing as well as the delivery of the concerned of the products or services
(Heckmann, Comes and Nickel 2015).