Daniel Stanton - Supply Chain Management For Dummies

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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.

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.

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 emphasize a point to remember, a danger to be aware of, or information that you may find helpful.

The Tip icon marks tips (duh!) and shortcuts that you can use to make supply chain management easier.

Remember icons mark information that’s especially important to know. To siphon off the most important information in each chapter, skim the paragraphs that have these icons.

The Technical Stuff icon marks information of a highly technical nature that you can normally skip.

The Warning icon tells you to watch out! It marks important information that may save you headaches.

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 things you already know, but I’ve written the book so that you can start reading anywhere that catches your eye and then hunt for additional bits that sound interesting.

If your goal is to discover what supply chain management is, start with Part 1. If you’re trying to get a sense for how the pieces of a supply chain fit together in a framework, read about the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) Model in Part 2. If you need to get a handle on the technologies that are key to supply chain management, check out Part 3. If you’re looking for ways to drive strategic value for your company by using supply chain management tools, jump into Part 4. Finally, Part 5is packed with information that can help you grow your career in supply chain management.

Some of the material in this book will be useful if you’re preparing for a supply chain certification such as Certified Supply Chain Professional or SCPro (see Chapter 20), but you shouldn’t use it as a substitute for the official study guides.

No matter how you go through the book, you’ll eventually want to read all the chapters. Each chapter is useful on its own, but the chapters work together to help you see how interconnected the parts of a supply chain are and why you need to think about all of them when you make decisions that affect your business, your customers, and your suppliers.

For some helpful information about how to describe supply chain management, how to lead supply chain projects, and how to use the SCOR Model, check out the Cheat Sheet for this book by visiting https://www.dummies.com and entering the book’s title in the search field.