Components to supply chain management

One of the critical areas of manufacturing is having a solid supply chain. What is the supply chain responsible for? It is where you have raw goods that are converted into completed products. Effective management of the supply chain will leave you with completed products that are going to improve sales and the company's reputation. When you have the right manager on the supply chain, you will be able to move materials along the supply chain effectively, giving you a stronger reputation as well. For proper supply chain management to work, you will have 5 different phases that you need to understand:

1. Plan
2. Develop
3. Make
4. Deliver
5. Return

Plan
During this phase you will spend time understanding the different activities and processes that need to be developed. Management will need to focus on developing various strategies in order to find a method that will work effectively on their supply chain. Keeping the processes moving slowly is not easy to do and it does require the right type of planning to see an impact.

Develop
The second phase is the development phase. This is where you work with different suppliers and focus on building good relationships with them. The goal is to work on getting suppliers that will offer you lower prices along with better raw materials and other things to help you stay on top of your supply chain. A good vendor will rush you supplies, preventing you from losing customers when you cannot produce products for them in a timely manner.

Make
The make stage will consist of creating the actual products. All the products you create need to be tested for safety and other things before you start packaging them and sending them out for delivery. Effective management of your supply chain is important to keep up with the customer's demands.

Deliver
This is also vital to your company as you need to have the right delivery service to work with in order to get the products to the customers in a timely manner. The clients not only need the products on time, they also need to have them in mint condition. Work with multiple shipping companies to find one that packages and delivers the products correctly so they are not damaged when they get to your customers.

Return
If a product is defective or damaged during shipping, you need to have a smart returns policy. This is important to improve your customer relationships and vital to the supply chain. Your delivery service should have a policy as well if they are at-fault for the damaged products.

More than anyone else within the company, management really can make or break how the business runs and how the supply chain functions. You need to know the importance of producing quality products and what would happen to the organization if you do not complete these products in a timely manner and create products that are impressive to the customers. Market research can help you to understand what the customers are looking for and will help you to improve your products and marketing tactics.

Supply chain management is something that requires consistent gathering of information. You need to start by using market research and then moving into other things as well like negotiating with suppliers for better prices on raw goods. The more information you have, the easier it will be to provide customers with better products and ones that are effective and will provide you with the right customer satisfaction you need to improve the organization and build up a stronger reputation.