Critical Factors Affecting Supply Chain Management
Read these sections for an in-depth look at the supply chain management factors that affect a business' operations. These sections explore environmental factors, internal company issues, governmental factors, the role of IT, logistics, suppliers, and more.
Introduction
Supply chain management is applied by companies across the globe due to its demonstrated
results such as delivery time reduction, improved financial performance, greater customer
satisfaction, building trust among suppliers, and others. According to D'Amours,
Ronnqvist, and Weintraub, companies resort to supply chain practices to improve
their performance. Thus, it is important to first understand how their supply chains work.
Figure 1 shows a generalized supply chain in the forest products industry.
Fig. 1. Forest and wood products supply chain
Figure 2 illustrates another example of the steps in a supply chain for wood pallet
manufacturing industries. This process begins with logging operations, logs are then sent to
the sawmill where cants and/or pallet parts are sent to the wood pallet manufacturer (pallet
operations). Lastly, once wood pallets are manufactured, they are sent to a distributor or
directly to the final customer.
Fig. 2. Hypothesized wood pallet manufacturing process
Source: Henry Quesada, Rado Gazo, and Scarlett Sanchez, https://learn.saylor.org/pluginfile.php/1282509/mod_resource/content/1/Critical%20Factors%20Affecting%20Supply%20Chain%20Management%20-%20CC%20BY%203.0.pdf This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.