STUDENTS' CORNER - 198
Supply chain keeps
you alive, continuously alive at that
Supply Chain a
business terminology is actually a process without which nothing can happen
even in life. As a matter of fact, from a very small event like milk supply to
your doorstep to the most significant fact of medicines that sustain life being
supplied to you on the prescription by a pharmacist, everything happens because
of supply chain.
In business ,
supply chain involves all the materials required for a product ; say, you are
selling bakery products like bread; it means the company that supplies bread to
you must send the required quantity to you on time so that you will not
disappoint your customers. The company that supplies bread to you must get
necessary materials like wheat in a required quantity so that he can supply
bread to his customers, so on. The wheat
selling agency must have adequate quantity of wheat so that he need not
disappoint his customers like you. If you go backwards like this you may not
end up since this retrogressive process continues for every kind of materials.
You cannot stop with the farmers who cultivate wheat; he is dependent on so
many facts like water, pesticides, farming and adequate workforce. If all
things down the line go smooth, then, the business thread remains unsnapped. In
business language, it is called vertical coordination and cooperation. At a
relevant place we shall discuss both coordination and cooperation.
Here comes the
Relationship Management in supply chain efficiency. The aim of Relationship Management is to
strongly build mutually fulfilling long-term relationship that helps sustain
business with a reasonable but continuous margin of profit. Actually it is an effective marketing network
that keeps the business going in the right direction.
It is obvious that
relationship marketing has four integral constituents: customers, employees,
marketing partners like suppliers, dealers etc
and financial community like shareholders, investors , so on. All the four constituents must prefer to stay
on in the partnership and this is possible when the transactions among them are
rewarding amply. Mutual prosperity is
the key word for a sustainable marketing network. A stable sense of relatedness
goes a long way in establishing consistently performing marketing network. We shall see in our next session the significance
of relatedness in a successful supply chain management.
