1.

2. The overall management of the way resources are obtained, stored and moved to the locations where they are
required. Logistics management entails identifying potential suppliers and distributors; evaluating how accessible
and effective they are and establishing relationships and signing contracts with the companies who offer the best
combination of price and service.
3. Materials management as a definition is the process which integrates the flow of supplies into, through and out of
an organization to achieve a level of service which ensures that the right materials are available at the right place
at the time in the right quantity and quality and at the right cost.
Material Management is responsible for purchasing the highest quality equipment and products at the lowest
possible cost for the organization.
4. supply management describes the methods and processes of modern corporate or institutional buying. This
may be for the purchasing of supplies for internal use referred to as indirect goods and services, purchasing raw
materials for the consumption during the manufacturing process, or for the purchasing of goods for inventory to be
resold as products in the distribution and retail process.
Supply management deals primarily with the oversight and management of materials and services inputs,
management of the suppliers who provide those inputs, and support of the process of acquiring those inputs.
The performance of supply management departments and supply management professionals is commonly
measured in terms of amount of money saved for the organization
5. Flow production involves a continuous movement of items through the production process. This means that
when one task is finished the next task must start immediately. Therefore, the time taken on each task must be
the same.
involves the use of production lines such as in a car manufacturer where doors, engines, bonnets and wheels
are added to a chassis as it moves along the assembly line. It is appropriate when firms are looking to
produce a high volume of similar items. Some of the big brand names that have consistently high demand
are most suitable for this type of production.
6. Business logistics refers to a group of related activities all involved in the movement and storage of products and
informationfrom the sources of raw materials through to final consumers and beyond to recycling and disposal
Business logistics is a relatively new term and concept in modern business vocabulary; its origins can be
traced back to World War II when the ability to mobilize personnel and material was critical to the outcome of
the war
7. Marketing logistics involve the transportation of goods in a planned manner which offers control over the
distribution mechanism.
8. Supply chain management (SCM) is the oversight of materials, information, and finances as they move in a
process from supplier to manufacturer to wholesaler to retailer to consumer
Supply chain management involves coordinating and integrating these flows both within and among
companies. It is said that the ultimate goal of any effective supply chain management system is to reduce
inventory (with the assumption that products are available when needed). As a solution for successful supply
chain management, sophisticated software systems with Web interfaces are competing with Webbased application service providers (ASP) who promise to provide part or all of the SCM service for
companies who rent their service.
9. Demand chain management (DCM) is the management of relationships between suppliers and customers to
deliver the best value to the customer at the least cost to the demand chain as a whole. Demand chain
management is similar to supply chain management but with special regard to the customers

HISTORY

History of Supply Chain Management

Over the last 100 plus years of the history of supply chain management has evolved from an initial focus on improving
relatively simple, but very labor-intensive processes to the present day engineering and managing of extraordinarily
complex global networks. We will take you through the last 60 plus years below and end the post with an amazing
infographic.

History of Supply Chain Management: Roots

Both industrial engineering and operations research have their roots in logistics. Fredrick Taylor, who wrote The Principles
of Scientific Management in 1911 and is considered the father of industrial engineering, focused his early research on how
to improve manual loading processes. Operations Research began when scientists demonstrated the value of analytics in
the study of military logistics problems in the 1940s as a result of the complex requirements of World War II. While
Industrial Engineering and Operations Research have each tried to maintain separate identities, many of their biggest
successes have occurred when used in an integrated framework to address supply chain and logistics issues. Increasingly
this is referred to by industry as Supply Chain Engineering.

History of Supply Chain Management: The Early Years

In the 1940s and 1950s, the focus of logistics research was on how to use mechanization (e.g., palletsand pallet lifts) to
improve the very labor intensive processes of material handling and how to take better advantage of space using racking
and better warehouse design and layout. The unit load concept gained popularity and the use of pallets became
widespread. In the mid 1950s, this concept was extended to transportation management with the development of
intermodal containers together with ships, trains, and trucks to handle these containers. This was a prerequisite for the
supply chain globalization that was to come much later. Although the terms warehousing and materials handling were
used to describe many of these efforts, this work could be viewed as fundamental applications of industrial engineering
rather than as a discipline of it own.
By the 1960s, a clear trend had developed in shifting more time-dependent freight transportation to truck rather than rail.
This led to the need for joint consideration of warehousing, material handling, and freight transportation, which emerged
under the label of Physical Distribution. The National Council of Physical Distribution Management was formed in 1963 to
focus industry attention on this area and quickly became the predominant organization in the field. Academic research and
education followed this trend to satisfy the growing industry recognition of the needs in this area. This area gained much
wider recognition in both industry and academia due in large part to the fundamental paradigm change that occurred
during the 1960s and 1970s with regard to computers. Prior to the 1960s, virtually all transactions and record keeping
were done manually. The computerization of this data opened the door to a huge opportunity for innovations in logistics
planning, from randomized storage in warehouses tooptimization of inventory and truck routing. The technologies,
particularly those from Operations Research, that researchers had to this point only been able to examine in theoretical
models had now become much closer to reality. However, there were still many difficult research issues to resolve in the
transition from theory to practice. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, this led to the creation at Georgia Tech of the
Production and Distribution Research Center, the Material Handling Research Center, and the Computational Optimization
Center. Each of these centers was focused on a different aspect of what this new computer technology made possible.

History of Supply Chain Management: Logistics Comes of Age

The 1980s marked the beginning of a sea-change in logistics in the history of supply chain management. The emergence
of personal computers in the early 1980s provided tremendously better computer access to planners and a new graphical

environment for planning. This spawned a flood of new technology including flexible spreadsheets and map-based
interfaces which enabled huge improvements in logistics planning and execution technology. The Production and
Distribution Research Center was the early innovation leader in combining map interfaces with optimization models for
supply chain design and distribution planning. The Material Handling Research Center provided leadership in developing
new control technology for material handling automation. The Computational Optimization Center developed new large
scale optimization algorithms that enabled solution of previously intractable airline scheduling problems. Much of the
methodology developed in these centers rapidly began to find its way into commercial technology.
Perhaps the most important trend for logistics in the 1980s was that it had begun to get tremendous recognition in industry
as being very expensive, very important, and very complex. Company executives became aware of logistics as an area
where they had the opportunity to significantly improve the bottom line if they were willing to invest in trained professionals
and new technology. In 1985, the National Council of Physical Distribution Management changed its name to the Council
of Logistics Management (CLM). The reason given for the name change by the new CLM was to reflect the evolving
discipline that included the integration of inbound, outbound and reverse flows of products, services, and related
information. Prior to this, logistics was a term that had been used almost exclusively to describe the support of military
movements.

History of Supply Chain Management: The Technology Revolution

The logistics boom was fueled further in the 1990s by the emergence of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.
These systems were motivated in part by the successes achieved by Material Requirements Planning systems developed
in the 1970s and 1980s, in part by the desire to integrate the multiple databases that existed in almost all companies and
seldom talked to each other, and in part by concerns that existing systems might have catastrophic failures as a result of
not being able to handle the year 2000 date. In spite of some significant problems in getting the ERP systems installed
and working, by 2000 most large companies had installed ERP systems. The result of this change to ERP systems was a
tremendous improvement in data availability and accuracy. The new ERP software also dramatically increased recognition
of the need for better planning and integration among logistics components. The result was a new generation of
Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) software.

History of Supply Chain Management: Globalization and Supply Chains

The widespread recognition of the term supply chain has come primarily as a result of the globalization of manufacturing
since the mid 1990s, particularly the growth of manufacturing in China. U.S. IMPORTS FROM CHINA grew from about
$45 billion per year in 1995 to more than $280 billion per year in 2006. The focus on globalization accented the need for
logistics strategies to deal with complex networks including multiple entities spanning multiple countries with diverse
control. There has been an increasing trend to use the term supply chain management to refer to strategic issues and
logistics to refer to tactical and operational issues. This growing association of supply chain management with strategy is
reflected in the Council of Logistics Managements changing its name to the Council of Supply Chain Management
Professionals in 2005. They make the distinction that Logistics is that part of the supply chain process that plans,
implements, and controls the efficient, effective forward and reverse flow and storage of goods, services, and related
information between the point of origin and the point of consumption in order to meet customers requirements while
Supply Chain Management is the systemic, strategic coordination of the traditional business functions and the tactics
across these business functions within a particular company and across businesses within the supply chain for the
purposes of improving the long-term performance of the individual companies and the supply chain as a whole.

History of Supply Chain Management: The Future of Supply Chain and

Logistics
Since the 1980s, computer technology has advanced at such a phenomenal rate that it is currently far ahead of the ability
of the supply and logistics field to adequately utilize the new technologies. Given the extent of Internet usage today, it is
hard to believe that Microsofts Internet Explorer 1.0 was released in 1995. The communication capabilities have
fundamentally changed the way we think about communications and information sharing. However, supply chain and
logistics planning is still primarily based on the distributed models that came as the result of personal computers. There is
no question that academic research can enable a new generation of supply chain and logistics planning technology based
on centralized planning with distributed collaboration. These technology advances can provide tremendous value in
addressing traditional supply chain and logistics areas such as warehousing and distribution, transportation, and
manufacturing logistics. However, there are also many non-traditional areas such as health care logistics and
humanitarian logistics which can get great value from building on the concepts and technologies that have already proven
successful in the traditional supply chain and logistics areas. Finally, there are extremely valuable insights to be gained by
systematically studying the supply chain and logistics performance of companies across multiple industries and countries.