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Movie Madness
The Supply Chain and the management thereof is the most important process in business today. The supply chain is how a product is created, manufactured all the way to a final consumer purchase. Determining this supply chain and making modifications can be the single biggest change to any industry. In this section, the supply chain management strategies of the movie rental industry will be discussed by first looking at what is a supply chain and how it applies to eBusiness. A further look at the history of the movie industry supply chain will be discussed with a subsequent discussion on 3 industry examples: Netflix, Blockbuster and Intelliflix.
Supply Chain
Schnieder (2004) defines the term supply chain as being "all the activities undertaken by every predecessor in the value chain to design, produce, promote, market, deliver, and support each individual component of that product or service." (pg 207) This means that for Widget Inc that sells artificial pre-lit Christmas trees then there are multiple supply chains for the various components such as the tree lights, the wire for the branches, the plastic for the artificial needles and the final packing for the trees.
Therefore the purchasing department for Widget Inc has to consider these individual supply chains to ensure the company gets its parts in a timely manner and for a cost that does not inflate the final product cost. Supply chain management is frequently managed by a company's purchasing department who, as described by Schnieder (2004), "has been tasked with buying all these components at the lowest price possible" (pg 207). The question can then be asked, how does eBusiness affec ...