New managerial challenges from supply chain opportunities

Supply chain is an emerging term that emphasizes interactions among marketing, logistics, and production. With this term and its application come opportunities associated primarily with managing the logistics channel across the legal boundaries of enterprises, such as between firms and their suppliers. In this paper, there is a discussion of the evolution of logistics to see how it is defined and practiced today, with the intent of highlighting the emerging opportunities for channel performance improvement. It is shown that supply chain management has moved us from an intrafunctional vision of the channel toward an interfunctional and even inter-organizational one. Examples are given to illustrate the type of problems that are associated with each of these visions. Focus is given to those problems inherent in managing inter-organizationally, since this is where traditional management tools and techniques are no longer appropriate. The new metrics, informational sharing systems, and allocation-of-benefits procedures needed to operate in the expanded channel are discussed. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.