REVIEW

Business firms across the world are competing hard to make strategies in order to survive in this new
era of globalisation where competition is not on the national level but international level. In this
uncertain and changing business environment, almost every business (whether large-scale, mediumscale or small-scale) is trying its best to adapt to the environment changes, and most of them have
shifted from traditional way of doing business to a way that best suits its operations, activities and
strategies in this new era. Supply Chain is a major part of a business organization that exhibits its
operations and activities that it performs to deliver the value to the customers. Supply Chain is a
sequence of processes or stages that interlinks the first step of procuring the raw-material to the end
step of finally delivering the value to the consumer with many stages in between including conversion
of raw material into products, dispatching it to the wholesalers and retailers and so on.
Through the mechanism of value chains, business organizations can achieve a competitive advantage
of either low cost or differentiation through the process activities and their corresponding links with
the buyers and suppliers (Klassen and Why bark, 1994). These linkages and networks have to be
managed carefully to reduce cost as well as lead time and more importantly to improve the quality.
These activities, linkages and networks of the value chain become spread across the globe, so it
becomes necessary to coordinate the operations carefully. To improve the coordination, the first step is
to identify and understand the present context of the supply chain management practices within the
countries and across the countries depending upon the business whether it is a national business or an
international business, and then to identify the challenges and opportunities and the factors that affect
the performance of the supply chain.
CHALLENGES
Today, companies face a variety of challenges when it comes to gaining the greater visibility of the
supply chain. Whether maintaining a single source or multi source supply chain in any industry, but
without supply chain visibility the companies are challenged by several factors including the
requirement to build cost effective supply chains that align with the movement of products to delivery
dates, configuring routes and transportation modes to accommodate different products and sources
based on locations of suppliers, fulfilment centres, distribution centres and stores. Having visibility in
supply chain will help a company being more reliable and responsive which will increase the
customer satisfaction.
Every firm is involved in the process of supply chain but how much the supply chain is required to
managed depends on the several factors like the complexity of the product, the number of suppliers,
availability of raw material. A supply chain has number of stages, and at every stage of it there are one
or more than one relationships and linkages that either of more importance or less importance, so an
organization must decide its supply chain network structure that suits it better. A long supply chain
brings a variety of complexities with it, therefore management has to choose the relationships that will
be apposite for a particular supply chain links. This could be done by sorting out which members of
the supply chain are essential for the success of the organization and those should be allocated focus
and resources. Moreover, networked organizations are the new competitive arena and the core
problem in managing them is dealing with variability, complexity, collaboration and flexibility etc.
Developing an efficient, environmentally sustainable and responsive supply chain network seems to
be a key to the future success. The supply chain networks are somewhat or more complex and their
analysis needs a carefully designed approach. As complexities of technology has increased, the
production and supply chain networks have become more dynamic and complex to handle. In
different businesses, operations in a supply chain are restricted by different sets of objectives and
constraints. Variety of available policies and the complex trade-offs between cost, product quality,

delivery time etc. are the other issues associated with the design and management problems of the
supply chain networks. Information plays an effective role in the functioning of the long supply chain
networks, but there is lack of studies that deals with the dynamics of the supply chains. Therefore, this
issue of dynamic configuration of long chains of supply requires serious research attention.
Supply Chains tend to be dynamic because of the frequent changes in suppliers, customers, products
and more importantly due to the changes in the demand of the customers. It seems that the
information systems required to manage these networks are not flexible enough to adapt to changes.
The objective of the supply chain management is to coordinate and optimize the supply demand
relationship by managing the flow of information. Most of the strategies for supply chain like quick
response, vendor managed inventory and continuous replenishment programs, etc. embed
information sharing as the cornerstone of their programs. There exists problems of management of
information flow and uncertainties, that makes the operation of supply chain in an organization very
complicated and challenging.
One of the challenges that businesses are dealing with today is the increase in the volatility of
demand. The manufacturing enterprises should possess capability to react with flexibility to
disturbances, it should also have the discretion to adapt in an environment frequented by quick
changes in manufacturing configuration and responsiveness to aberrations should be quick. To
overcome such problems, businesses needs to focus on developing such an ability that could help
them to respond to the changes in terms of volume and variety in shorter time period.

CONCLUSION & RECOMMENDATION

Although, supply chain seems to be a straight line process from procuring raw material to delivering
the value to the customers, but it is not up to that much. The process of supply chain and supply chain
management consists of many activities, transactions, stages, flow of goods and services, finance,
information and relationships among various members etc., so it is a vast concept. Competition has
been rising and will keep on rising in the coming future, and it will depend on the businesses
themselves that how are they reacting to that. A business cannot go so far without focussing on its
supply chain and making it responsive and adaptable to the changing environment. For that an
organisation will have to develop its ability, systems and the technology that could help it in
delivering value to the customer in less time at a right cost. The development and designing new
technologies is seen as a major factor in developing business competitiveness. Technologies for
automated and with business intelligent machines will be developed in the future that will be taking
care of the sustainability and environment aspects, and will enforce the competitive spirit among the
businesses. Looking at the dynamic features of a supply chain, many hybrid approaches are used to
study the impact of different supply chain strategies and policies and will help in building trust among
the managers and supply chain partners.