The document outlines the key aspects of supply chain management, emphasizing its importance as a philosophy that connects a company to the wider world. It details the six main processes in supply chain operations: planning, sourcing, making, delivering, returning, and enabling, alongside strategies for managing challenges like cost, flexibility, and visibility. Additionally, it highlights the role of technology and innovation in optimizing supply chains and the necessity of collaboration both internally and externally.

1. Implementing Supply Chain
Management
Created By: Kelby Schwender
Penn State Business student

2. Bottom-Line Insight

3. “Supply Chain Management is more than a job, it’s a philosophy. It’s a way of
understanding how a company creates value and how it connects to the rest of the world.”

4. Focus on Supply Chain
Processes

5. Use a process framework
● Supply Chain Operations Reference model breaks supply chain processes into six
main groups:
○ Plan- the processes where you map out how everything in the supply chain is supposed to work
○ Source- where you build relationships with you suppliers and buy your materials
○ Make- which includes all of the processes for manufacturing or assembly
○ Deliver- the processes for getting your products or services into the hands of your customers
○ Return- those often overlooked processes for taking back products that your customers don’t need or
want
○ Enable- which includes all of the other processes that you need to keep a supply chain working
smoothly
● “A good framework is an essential part of aligning an organization around a common
set of goals and successfully implementing supply chain management.”

6. Plan the supply chain
● “Implementing supply chain management starts with understanding how we want our
supply chain to work.”
● There are four main elements at the heart of any supply chain:
○ Customers
○ Products or services
○ Resources
○ Constraints (suppliers, facilities, and staff)
● “Effective supply chain management starts with the processes you use for planning
all of your other processes.”

7. Source inputs
● “Before you’ll have a product or service to sell to your customers, you generally need
to buy things from your suppliers. We sometimes call that procurement or
purchasing. But in the SCOR Model, it’s part of the source process.”
● “Implementing supply chain management allows you to use strategic sourcing to
evaluate the real impact that your purchasing decisions have on your whole business.”

8. Make products and services
● “When a customer places an order, they’re pulling the supply chain. When a company makes a product,
they’re pushing the supply chain.”
● “If a company makes products before customers have bought them, it’s called a make to stock approach, or a
push supply chain.”
● “With pull supply chains, customer demand sets the pace for production, so there’s never a chance for
inventory to pile up.”
● “By aligning your production strategy with all of your other supply chain processes, you’ll begin to see the
huge benefits that come from implementing supply chain management.”

9. Deliver products
● “The deliver processes fall into three main categories, order management,
transportation and distribution.”
○ “The next set of delivery processes occur in warehouses or distribution centers, receiving products,
putting them away, picking them, packing them and shipping them off to the next step in a supply
chain.”
○ “That brings us to the third set of deliver processes, transportation.”
● “Aligning the processes you use to manage orders, distribution and transportation is a
critical part of implementing supply chain management successfully.”

10. Return products
● “A good process can help you capture the most value from returned products while
also building loyalty with your customers.”
● “Reverse supply chains can help you cut costs, improve service, increase revenues,
and be more sustainable, and that’s why your return processes are critical for
implementing supply chain management correctly.”

11. Enable supply chains
● “Enable is really a bucket for all of the other things you need to make a supply chain
work but that don’t fit neatly into the first five groups.”

12. Manage Supply Chain
Challenges

13. Prioritize goals
● “You have to maintain balance in order to meet multiple goals such as keeping costs
low, providing a high level or service and earning a profit for your business.”
● “Using a balanced scorecard you can track multiple key performance indicators for
this business.”
● “Because supply chains are complex systems, we need to monitor the impact of our
decisions across many areas of the balance.”

14. Calculate total costs
● “Saving money is great, but in supply chain, cutting costs in one place can increase
costs in another.”
● “The power of supply chain management comes from looking across the functions in
your business and working with your customers and suppliers to make sure you’re
delivering the most value at the lowest cost.”

15. Manage competing goals
● “Resolving conflicts can be hard work, but the key is to understand all of your goals
and then communicate and collaborate across business functions and across
companies.”

16. Mitigate risks
● “Leaders need to understand the risks facing their supply chain, and team members
need to understand how to respond when riska emerge.”
● “Supply chains change all the time.”
● “You should keep your risk register up to date by repeating the PREPARE process on
a regular basis. By being prepared, you can lower the risks facing your company, and
help tp protect your entire supply chain.”

17. Invest in flexibility
● “Flexibility has to do with both time and money. It’s how easy it is for your supply
chain to scale up or scale down to respond to changes both in upstream supply and in
downstream demand.”
● “Upside flexibility is important for taking advantages of sales opportunities.”
● “The important thing is to understand that your supply chain needs to be flexible
because the world around you is unpredictable. Designing flexibility into your supply
chain is really about ensuring that you can respond to changes quickly and without
spending a lot of money.”

18. Increase visibility with a control tower
● “Supply chain management involves three steps. Planning, execution, and visibility.”
● “Visibility might be the most valuable of the three, because the more you know about what’s really happening
in your supply chain, the better decisions you can make about what to do next.”
● “You have to decide what information you need, where to get it, and how to tie it together in ways that are
useful. When you have a control tower in place, it’s much easier for people to identify and respond to issues.”
● “The sooner you know about an issue, the more options you have to deal with it, and the less it will cost you.”

19. Supply chain innovation
● “The key to making improvements in any supply chain is innovation because that’s
how we find new and better ways to create value but innovation comes in two
different forms, sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation.”
● “Innovation isn’t just a good thing, it’s an essential survival skill. Learning how to
cultivate both sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation can help you deliver a
steady stream of improvements and ensure that your supply chain will drive real
value for your business.”

20. Monitor Supply chain
Trends

21. Ecommerce and social media
● “One of the biggest challenges we face is that customer expectations change quickly.”
● “Social media amplifies consumer behavior by making it easy to share product news, recommendations, and
endorsements.”
● “eCommerce often bypasses retail stores, it creates an opportunity for brands to sell directly to their
customers.”
● Using eCommerce and social media means that brands need to transform their distribution process, and maybe
even personaloze their products.”

22. Internet and data trends
● “One of the ways to create value from supply chain data is through analytics.”
○ “Analytics involves using your data to gain insight about what’s happening in your supply chain”
● “The internet is having a profound impact on supply chains. The internet of things and the growth of
consumer data are leading to issues with big data for supply chains.”
● Using a cloud is a great way of storing data
○ “A cloud-based approach makes it easier to scale your storage and your processign up and down
because you’re basically just renting space. It also makes it easy to access that data from any computer
or any device that’s connected to the internet.”
● “This data often needs to be managed using cloud computing and we can use analytics to gain insights about
our business and find new ways to create value for our company, for our customers and for the entire supply
chain.”

23. Artificial intelligence and machine learning
● “The point in between, where people and computers work together, is called the
human machine interface.”
● “The good news about artificial intelligence is that it has the potential to make supply
chains run faster, better, and cheaper.”

24. Blockchain
● “Blockchain is just a way to keep lists of information and the transactions that occur between people or
companies, but the way that blockchains store these transactions is unique.”
○ “Once a transaction is added to a blockchain, it can never be changed or removed.”
● “Blockchains can act as a sort of universal connector for information from different systems.”
● “Blockchains can help with data reliability.”
● “Blockchains make it easier to hold everyone accountable to the agreements they make.”

25. Automation, robotics, and drones
● “With artificial intelligence, sensors and wireless communications, we’re now able to build machines that
know what’s happening around them and that can respond quickly.”
● “Enabling more automation means basically we are replacing human workers with robots of one sort or
another.”
○ “Robots can increase your efficiency by evening our the flow of your supply chain processes.”
● “Drones might soon replace people in lots of jobs where we need to move products on the ground, in the air,
and over the ocean and they’re already being used for gathering inventory data and inspecting facilities.”
● “Advanced manufacturing and distribution technologies are becoming more powerful and less expensive all
the time.”

26. Implement a Supply
Chain Agenda

27. Get the right people in the right positions
● “Preparing the people in your organization starts with training and education.”
● “Your team needs to understand that their goals should align with the larger goals for
your company, and everyone needs to focus on creating and delivering value to your
customers.”
○ “You have to get the right people in the right positions in order to move forward with implementing a
supply chain management agenda.”

28. Select the right technologies
● “Keep your technology roadmap current can help you decide whether you have the
right technologies in place to deliver the results you expect based on the maturity of
your supply chain.”
● “Having the right technology is a critical enabler for the successful implementation of
your supply chain management agenda.”

29. Collaborate internally
● “Rather than each business function working toward their own isolated metrics, we
need to align decisions around the metrics that really matter to our customers, and our
shareholders.”
● “Getting the folks inside of your organization working together, through cross-
functional planning and execution is an important part of making supply chain
management work.

30. Collaborate externally
● “If your customers are able to share sales and inventory data with you, then you can
do a better job of making sure you have enough inventory to meet their needs but not
more.”
● “External collaboration can help your company compete effectively and enjoy the
benefits of implementing supply chain management.”
● If collaboration is done right, “collaboration is good for your customers, good for
your suppliers, and it’s good for you and your company too.”

31. Manage projects effectively
● “Supply chain management is about much more than just lowering costs or improving
service. It’s about maximizing value by coordinating and collaborating effectively.”
● “We need to constantly leverage new tools and connect the processes throughout our
supply chain in order to respond to our customers’ changing needs and to transform
business threats into opportunities.”
○ “When you learn to do that well, then your success and the success of your company are virtually
guaranteed.”