Last updated on April 1st, 2024 at 05:20 am
IIT Roorkee: Changing The Face of The Supply Chain Management Industry in 2022
Supply Chain Management (SCM) is sequentially connected activities that aim to fulfil the demand (product or service) of a client. There are several stakeholders in this process, namely the vendors, manufacturers, whole-sellers, dealers and retailers. All these stakeholders are connected by the most important stakeholder, who is the Logistics Partner. Supply chain management activities essentially involve the flow of information and product or services through several complex networking.
How to Get Started in This Career?
After completing the UG course in any field, a prospective candidate may enrol himself/herself in a reputed institute. These renowned institutions will pave the path to an excellent supply chain management career. They also provide certifications for supply chain professionals. A prospective candidate must possess the basic aptitude for learning business processes and preferably should have mathematics as one of the subjects in the UG course. Business management, institutional behaviour and management principles, corporate communication, human resource management, statistics and economics are the core subjects that are to be taught in the post-graduate diploma certification courses for supply chain management.
Several elective subjects are also available to choose from. These include principles of supply chain management and logistics, product and brand management, inventory and warehouse management and international trade and operations.
The Changing Face of Supply Chain Management
Nowadays, clients have become more demanding than ever, both in terms of quality and promptness in service. To get these on the table, they are even ready to pay a reasonable premium. The spree of purchasing, particularly in the retail sector, has gone up considerably. The purchasing power of an average Indian in a middle-class family has also increased. The supplier-customer relationship in 2022 is not the same as it was a decade back. The concept of supply chain management has transformed enormously throughout the past decade. Previously, the general idea was to consider it as a mere procurement department. In today’s world, supply chain management has taken over marketing or business management, which organisations practised lately a decade back.
The pandemic has changed our lives forever. Though online shopping was already practised earlier, it became multi-fold during and after the pandemic era. Nowadays, with the introduction of data science and artificial intelligence into the operating system, the organisation gets rated for the product or service it sells. Such ratings depend not only on the quality of the product but also on its payment process, packaging, delivery time and return policy among other points. All these processes are essentially part and parcel of supply chain management. These ratings by customers become a guiding manual for prospective clients, who wish to go for the same or similar products or services. Thus, sellers cannot remain complacent by only maintaining the quality of the product through stringent checks on their vendors; but also, they should have strong and efficient supply chain management and logistics networking so that they may score high in the rating procedure. In fact, in today’s time, those companies are perceived in a good light whose supply chain management is up to the mark.
New Challenges
There is no denying that the changing demand of customers has paved the way for the rapid transformation of supply chain management and added to its growth trajectory in a significant way. However, all these do not come without their set of challenges, which are new and dynamic, as well. The organisation sometimes fails to make it to a win-win situation in spite of having the best vendors with a strong operation and logistics team. The devil to this effect is the lack of seamless coordination between the different stakeholders in the whole process. Communication within the planning and execution departments within the same organisation gets tricky at times and results in poor results at the bottom line. The correct inventory management by the manufacturers is also a high-risk affair. The inventory should not be too high so that it keeps waiting for a long time to find a taker. It should not also be too low so that a prospective client is directed towards a competitor. De-risking hazards and price volatility are genuine concerns for organisations.
The Way Ahead
In order to take stock of the situation, organisations must make good use of the history data or past feedback information efficiently to plan their inventory, both for the raw material and the finished goods. Through these data, the organisation may also record the pattern change in demand. So, they may even decide to discontinue a product or a service that the clients do not wish to have anymore.
Conclusion
As a profession, supply chain management aspirants may surely expect a rewarding career and sustainable growth in the long term. Candidates may even choose to be a Business Analyst and support the overall supply chain management system. The IIT Roorkee supply chain management course at Imarticus is an online course. This course will help you to make a successful career in this field.
