An Effective Framework For Teaching Supply Chain Management

Abstract NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract An Effective Framework for Teaching Supply Chain Management Abstract To survive in today’s competitive business environment, companies strive to adopt the strategies of supply chain management. Thus, supply chain management has become an integral part of the engineering management curriculum. This paper discusses a framework that can be helpful for teaching and managing supply chains effectively. The framework that is named the “Supply Chain Management Process Map” establishes a relation between the end-to-end supply chain processes and the strategic, tactical and operational decision phases of a supply chain. An example from the soft goods supply chain is presented to illustrate the proposed framework. 1. Introduction Supply chain management (SCM) education has become an important part of the management and engineering management curriculum. This is due to many companies realizing that eliminating supply chain inefficiencies such as excessive inventory levels, poor customer service, high operating costs, long order cycle times, and inefficient asset utilization can save millions of dollars. Based on the State of Logistics Report5, over $1 trillion (10% of Gross National Product – GNP) is spent on supply-related activities in the US alone, which implies large potential savings. Although everyone agrees on the importance of SCM, many companies still find it difficult to achieve supply chain excellence. Based on a recent survey2, in terms of cost versus revenue, average players in a supply chain are half as efficient as the star players. A good SCM curriculum can help students, thus their companies achieve supply chain excellence. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to provide a framework that can help not only teaching supply chain management more effectively but also making companies achieve supply chain excellence. Accurate characterization of the supply chain and the SCM processes is especially important with the increasing trends in outsourcing and globalization, which require tight communication and collaboration between multiple enterprises. Effective frameworks do not only enable communication and collaboration, but also can help supply chain partners to identify and eliminate non-value adding supply chain activities as part of a lean strategy, to check if the supply chain strategy is aligned with the company’s overall strategy, to benchmark against competition, and to select the right information technology infrastructure during the supply chain reengineering projects by focusing on the right processes. The proposed framework can enable the students, the future supply chain practitioners, to communicate and collaborate more effectively, which in turn should increase their company’s and the overall supply chain’s efficiency and the responsiveness to the end-customer needs. One of the most referred SCM frameworks is the Supply Chain Operations Reference4 (SCOR) model. It was developed by the Supply Chain Council, which was founded as a non-profit organization by AMR research (www.amrresearch.com), PRTM consulting (www.prtm.com) and 65 major companies. While SCOR provides standard terminology,