Supply-chain management consists of developing a strategy to organize, control, and motivate the resources involved in the flow of services and materials within the supply chain. A supply chain strategy, an essential aspect of supply chain management, seeks to design a firm’s supply chain to meet the competitive priorities of the firm’s operations strategy.
1 Supply Chain Strategy Across the Organization
Supply chains must be managed to coordinate the inputs with the outputs in a firm to achieve the appropriate competitive priorities of the firm’s enterprise processes. The Internet offers firms an alternative to traditional methods for managing supply chains. A supply chain strategy is essential …show more content…
2 Mass customization
Mass customization is a strategy whereby a firm’s flexible processes generate a wide variety of personalized services or products at reasonably low cost. Essentially, the firm allows customers to select from a variety of standard options to create the service or product of their choice.
1 Competitive advantages
A mass customization strategy has three important competitive advantages.
➢ Managing customer relationships
Mass customization requires detailed inputs from customers. The firm can learn a lot about its customers from the data it receives. Once customers are in the database, the firm can keep track of them over time.
➢ Eliminate finished goods inventory
Producing to a customer’s order is more efficient than producing to a forecast because forecasts are not perfect. The trick is to have everything you need to produce the order quickly. A technology some firms use for their order placement process is a software system called a configurator, which gives firms and customers easy access to data relevant to the options available for the service or product.
➢ Increased perceived value of services or products
With mass customization, customers can have it their way. In general, most customization often has a higher value in the mind of the customer than