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Introduction
Supply chain management is about seeing your business as an interconnected system. Supply Chain Management For Dummies covers the tools, rules, and language that you need to understand how the parts of your company’s supply chain fit together. The book also shows you how to plan and manage your supply chain in ways that reduce costs, increase profits, and minimize risk.
About This Book
Many books treat supply chain management as part of operations, logistics, or procurement, but this book takes a broader approach, showing that those functions are interconnected parts of a system.
I include lots of everyday examples that make it easy to understand each step in any supply chain and how virtually any company can employ supply chain principles.
Most people get to see only a small part of the supply chains that they work in. This book helps you understand all the other processes and systems in a supply chain, as well as how decisions that you make affect others up and down the supply chain, including your customers and suppliers. The book uses language that’s easy to understand and is organized in a way that makes access to specific topics easy.
Foolish Assumptions
In writing this book, I assumed that supply chain management is important to you because
You need to understand it for your current job.
You need to understand it for a future job.
You need to explain it to other people so that they can do their jobs better.
I assume that you have some connection to supply chain management, probably because you’ve studied or worked in logistics, operations, or procurement. I assume that you may have been taught to see supply chain management from a narrow, functional perspective rather than as an end-to-end, integrated system.
I assume that you want to understand how decisions made in one part of a supply chain can influence the results in another. Many companies have made bad choices with expensive consequences simply because they didn’t recognize the effects of those choices on their supply chains. When you consider that more than 70 percent of costs and 100 percent of revenue depend on supply decisions, it’s clearly worth the time and energy to understand how to manage a supply chain efficiently.
Icons Used in This Book
Icons emphasize a point to remember, a danger to be aware of, or information that you may find helpful.
Where to Go from Here
You can read this book in different ways, depending on why you’re reading it. You can certainly start at the beginning and skip the