Financing the Global Supply Chain: Growing Need for Management Action

This article investigates a growing desire by companies to better manage the financing of the global supply chain and explores best practices. Supply-chain managers and finance or treasury managers, however, live in different worlds, and integration does not come easily. The article argues that decentralized finance functions lead to financial inefficiencies. The authors identify five subarchitectures to competitive supply chains and argue that visualizing the supply chain financially is the first step to controlling and improving it. Finance is embedded in every step of the supply chain-and business model. Management guidelines of what to change, what to eliminate, and what to adapt are presented along with the new starting points of strategy and customers' ever-changing needs. Consequently, the end game is profit maximization rather than only cost minimization, and both within acceptable risk parameters. (C) 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.