The Right Supply Chain for Your Product

This article discusses the process required to develop an effective supply chain strategy for different types of products. It also explores the demand characteristics that need to be considered for successful supply chain management. The author highlights the importance of identifying the product type and assessing the efficiency and responsiveness of the supply chain. The article suggests incorporating physically efficient processes and effective communication within the organization. However, the author fails to establish the efficiency of the supply chain strategy.

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<THE RIGHT SUPPLY CHAIN FOR YOU PRODUCT>
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<Your Name>
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<Lecturer’s Name and Course Number>
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Right product supply chain:
Process required:
To develop a significant supply-chain strategy, organisations need to identify the product type,
for which the company is looking to initiate an effective supply chain. It is observed that
business firms need to determine whether the selected product falls under the innovative or
functional category. After that, it is required to assess whether the supply chain of the company
is efficient or responsive to the specific market. This determination will help managers to craft an
effective supply chain strategy.
It has stated that some causes such as rationing along with storage gaming, updating of demand
forecast, price fluctuation and order batching are there result in bullwhip effect. The forecasting
of products is needed for scheduling the products, controlling inventory, capacity planning as
well as planning for the requirements of materials (Jaipuria and Mahapatra, 2014). Moreover, a
business organisation needs to monitor as well as control order batching to endure an active
process of the supply chain. The distributors along with the manufacturers periodically have
some unique and specific promotions such as discounts on price and quantity, rebates, coupons,
and much more.
Demand characteristics:
As stated earlier, organisations need to identify the product category (e.g. functional and
innovative). Hence, the demand of function can be predicted from the current market research.
Generally, the demand for useful products remain more than two years, and contribution margin
remains from 5% to 20%. On another hand, the demand for innovative products is hard to
predict. It is observed that demand of product lifecycle remains three months to one year. Also,
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product variety is also high than functional products. Therefore, innovative products need to be
formulated by the companies for bringing an overall growth (Fredendall and Hill, 2016).
Moreover, the companies should incorporate the process of physically efficient as it is cost-
effective and helps in reducing the time and escalating performance.
Effective communication needs to be endured in an organisation. Moreover, the study of Lee et
al. (1997) has stressed that for performing forecast updates similar sources of data of demand
needs to be utilised. Moreover, inventory information should be accessed by the upstream site.
What has the author failed to establish in this article?
The companies are allowed to capture the voice of the consumers with the help of scanners of
point-of-sale. According to Fisher (1997), demand nature of products needs to be considered at
the time of spotting the light on the supply chain. In order to study the demanding environment
for the products, an active and proper strategy of supply chain needs to be endured by
considering the aspects of the life cycle of products, a variety of product, the standard of the
market along with demand predictability. In this article, the author has stated how to develop an
effective supply chain strategy for different kind of products. That means the author has
highlighted the effectiveness of supply chain strategy. Although, the efficiency of the supply
chain strategy was not established correctly. Hence, it can be said that more discussion on the
way a better supply chain strategy meets the demands of consumers might have been better.
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Reference list:
Fisher, M.L., 1997. What is the right supply chain for your product?. Harvard business
review, 75, pp.105-117.
Fredendall, L.D. and Hill, E., 2016. Basics of supply chain management. CRC Press.
Jaipuria, S. and Mahapatra, S.S., 2014. An improved demand forecasting method to reduce
bullwhip effect in supply chains. Expert Systems with Applications, 41(5), pp.2395-2408.
Lee, H.L., Padmanabhan, V. and Whang, S., 1997. The bullwhip effect in supply chains. Sloan
management review, 38, pp.93-102.
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