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.