Reflections Week Eleven

This week we talked about supply chain management (SCM) and the pros and cons of this kind of system. In class we had to discus pros and cons of supply chain management. It is pretty easy to come up with pros, however, discussing the cons was more difficult.
What are potential cons?

First off all, SCM requires a huge investment in technology and the know how on how to apply it. If you do the investment, without having the know how or the time or money to invest in training, the investment might as well be a total waste of money.
Also, SCM could result in a loss of jobs, as more of the supply chain is automated. However, I do believe this could also be considered a good thing, depending on the perspective you take. It is probably the managements objective to actually cut down jobs and thereby be more cost efficient, however, if you're the one to loose your job there is no doubt that this would be considerend a con - a bad thing about the use of supply chain management.

The last consequence we came up with, was too much infomation sharing. TodayWalmart has acces to its suppliers systems, and somehow Walmart basically takeover their suppliers businesses and eventully almost run their suppliers business...

Thinking about good thing about CRM is a lot easier. The pros are among other things: Increased efficiency, decreased costs, shorter lag times, decreased pollution, more effective CRM etc.