Supply Chain Strategy: Planning, Execution, and Competitive Advantages

This report provides an analysis of supply chain strategy, its building blocks, and its role in supporting business objectives. It examines the key components of supply chain management, including strategic planning, demand planning, supply planning, and the manufacturing process. The report highlights the importance of aligning supply chain strategy with business strategy to achieve competitive advantages. It also explores the role of the supply chain in meeting customer needs and the importance of operational excellence. Furthermore, the report discusses the competitive priorities such as short delivery cycles, on-time delivery, and cost-effectiveness, which contribute to gaining a competitive edge in the market. The report also references key academic sources to support its findings.

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Supply chain strategy
 Building blocks of supply chain strategy include strategic planning, demand planning,
supply planning, procuring, manufacturing. Strategic planning includes the elements
which are collaboration, supply network planning, promoting planning, demand and
supply network designing.
Demand planning includes the forecasting process, lifecycle planning process, promotion
planning, and consensus planning process.
The supply chain planning process includes the safety stock, supply network planning,
outsourcing, customer and supplier collaboration process.
The procurement process includes the Purchase order, receipts, invoice verification
process. The manufacturing process includes production planning and manufacturing
execution (Melnyk, et al., 2014).
 Supply chain strategy helps in making the operation to complete. Business strategy
includes leveraging the core competencies in the organization for achieving the goals and
objectives. Supply chain strategy helps in supporting the business strategy by analyzing
and helping in the decision making the process of offering products and services,
choosing the market segment as a competitive plan. The supply chain focuses on the
customers which helps in supporting the business strategy of achieving the goals and
objectives by satisfying the customers. Supply chain strategy is linked with the
operational excellence for providing success (Mitra and Bhardwaj, 2010).
 The competitive priorities include the short delivery cycles, deliver on-time, quality, low
costs and flexibility which helps in gaining the competitive advantages in supply chain
organization. To create competitive advantages, the organization requires a determination
of factors that helps in keeping the image in the market. In a supply chain organization,
the products are required to be delivered on time to customers for gaining the competitive
advantages (Stadtler, 2015)
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Reference
Melnyk, S. A., Narasimhan, R., & DeCampos, H. A. (2014). Supply chain design: issues,
challenges, frameworks and solutions.
Mitra, A., & Bhardwaj, S. (2010). Alignment of Supply Chain Strategy with Business
Strategy. IUP Journal of Supply Chain Management, 7(3).
Stadtler, H. (2015). Supply chain management: An overview. In Supply chain management and
advanced planning (pp. 3-28). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.