Solution:

What Supply Chain Management (SCM)?

• It's a management of the flow of good services, and includes all processes that transform raw materials into final products.

• The main objective of supply chain management is to monitor and relate production, distribution, and shipment of products and services.

• Supply chain activities cover everything from product development, sourcing, and logistics, as well as the information systems needed to coordinate these activities.

• Supply chain management basically merges the supply and demand management. It uses different strategies and approaches to view the entire chain and work efficiently at each and every step involved in the chain.

• Supply chain management relies on both business strategy, specialized software and collaboration to work's.

Five parts of supply chain management:

• 1) Plan.

• 2) Develop (Source).

• 3) Make.

• 4) Deliver.

• 5) Return.

1) Plan:

• This stage, the planning should mainly focus on designing a strategy that yields maximum profit.

• For managing all the resources required for designing products and providing services, a strategy has to be designed by the companies.

• Supply chain management mainly focuses on planning and developing a set of metrics.

2) Develop (Source):

• In this stage, we mainly concentrate on building a strong relationship with suppliers of the raw materials required for production.

• This handling comprises receiving and examining shipments, transferring them to the manufacturing facilities and authorizing supplier payments for it.

• The supply chain managers need to construct a set of pricing, delivery and payment processes with suppliers and also create the metrics for controlling and improving the relationships.

3) Make:

• In this stage, the products are designed, produced, tested, packaged, and synchronized for delivery.

• The supply chain manager is to schedule all the activities required for manufacturing, packaging and preparation for delivery.

• This stage is considered as the most metric-intensive unit of the supply chain.

4) Deliver:

• This stage is basically the logistics phase, where customer orders are accepted and delivery of the goods is planned, That's also known as delivery stage.

• Here the products are delivered to the customer at the destined location by the supplier.

• It's pertains to logistics, and focuses on getting finished goods to consumers, in whatever manner of transportation is needed.

5) Return:

• The final stage of supply chain management is the return stage.

• In the stage, defective or damaged goods are returned to the supplier by the customer.

• The planners of supply chain need to discover a responsive and flexible network for accepting damaged, defective and extra products back from their customers and facilitating the return process for customers who have issues with delivered products.