Designing a Supply Chain Management Plan for Your Industry

Scenario

You are a supply chain manager of a Supply Chain (SC) set in a particular industry. You have a clear understanding of your market (e.g. suppliers, customers, competitors / domestic or international) and have a clear strategy to monitor and improve the efficiency of your SC.

Your company could own facilities (e.g. production site, warehouses) and means of transport (e.g. road vehicles, vessels, aircrafts) or can ask third parties to be in charge of specific operations across the SC (outsourcing). You can decide to apply green practices to reduce the environmental impact of your operations, and innovative technologies or business models/practices to improve the efficiency.

An excellent MSc level submission will demonstrate innovative thinking, but it is important to make sure that you are also able to deliver against the following brief.

The task

Your task is to design a supply chain management plan for your chosen industry and to provide a clear strategy to manage operations and reach objectives. Your supply chain management plan will be communicated in two ways:

1. A presentation of your SC structure and strategy, where you will explain your network, market, stakeholders, operations management, and the green practices and new technologies you apply across the whole SC;

2. A written SC management plan.

• Select a current or entirely novel Supply Chain.
• Design the structure (map), including nodes/edges, flows, stakeholders involved.
• Analyse costs, times, quality requirements of your operations.
• Provide an understanding about how you manage risks, uncertainties and operations in order to improve your SC efficiency, and what approach/methods you use to make decisions.
• Evaluate the environmental impact of your operations and choose a set of green practices. Impacts should be quantified.
• Choose new technologies to improve your SC efficiency. Explain the reason of your choice and provide evidence of their impact.
• Identify a strategy to improve your SC operations in order to improve your overall performance.

Taken together, these requirements will mean that you need to collect evidence to support your assessment of the market demand, costs, times and potential to operate a commercially viable SC. For example, if you were proposing to refer to a domestic market, you would be expected to have researched the potential customers for your specific service at national level and show understanding of costs and times of each specific activity (e.g. supply, production, warehousing, transport/delivery).

You may need to consider a range of options before committing to one. Do seek advice from the module tutors and also discuss your ideas with course colleagues.