Supply Chain Concept
Introduction
In today's competitive business environment many firms face the arduous mission of managing their supply chain. In an effort to gain competitive advantage, firms must make key decision involving logistics and operations management to move products and service across the supply chain. The materialization and attractiveness of the Internet has made supply chain management more attainable for business enterprises. Research shows that Internet-derived technology has enabled companies to build and deploy supply chain management systems to perform key business decisions involving product flow and scheduling, process design and selection, product sourcing, layout, job design, and technology management. Implementation of supply chain management system gives firms the ability to publish information on a platform that can be accessed by the entire enterprise, suppliers, distributors, and customers all around the world. According to Gary Schneider (2004, p. 228, para. 1), author of E-Commerce the Second Wave, the ultimate goal of supply chain management is to achieve a higher-quality or lower-cost product at the end of the chain. This document gives a description of the supply chain concept and how it applies in eBusiness. Additionally, the benefits of the supply chain concept and the differences in the supply chain between a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) site compare to a Business-to-Business (B2B) site are explored.
The concept of the Supply Chain
The interaction between suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and consumers is important to understanding the supply chain concept. Schneider (2004, p. 544) defines the supply chain as "the part of an industry value chain that prece ...