Global Supply Chain Management Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3250 words

Global Supply Chain Management - Assignment Example The firms that practice supply chain management experience considerable reductions in cost and cycle time (Li and Du, 2005, p. 279). For instance, Wal-Mart stores reported an increase in inventory turns, decline in out-of-stock occurrences along with a renewal cycle that has decreased from weeks to only hours as a consequence of an effective supply chain management. Even though supply chain management is simple to understand in theory, it develops more complexity with bigger companies and it variety of products, more global locations of the suppliers, customers as well as facilities responsible for distribution. Supply chain management is also complicated since companies may be components of more than one pipeline at a specific time (Fredendall and Hill, 2001, p. 4). As an example, the manufacturer of synthetic rubber may simultaneously be a part of the supply chain for tires, industrial products, mechanical parts, shoes and aircraft components among others. Key drivers of supply cha in performance in a complex environmentLambert (2008, p. 20) found out that the performance of a supply chain is dependent of a number of drivers: logistical and functional including facilities, inventory, transport and information. FacilitiesFacilities define the physical locations where commodities are produced or stored, where storage and production sites make up the main forms of facilities (Zanjirani Farahani, Rezapour and Kardar, 2012, p. 193). In the facilities, there is either processing or transformation.