Current Issues in Operations and Supply Chain Management

OSCM is a dynamic field, and issues arising in global enterprise present exciting new challenges for operations managers. Looking forward to the future, we believe the major challenges in the field will be as follows:

1. Coordinating the relationships between mutually supportive but separate organizations. Recently, there has been a dramatic surge in the outsourcing of parts and services as companies seek to minimize costs. Many companies now even outsource major corporate functions, such as information systems, product development and design, engineering services, and distribution. The ability to coordinate these activities' is a significant challenge for todays operations and supply chain manager.

2. Optimizing global supplier, production, and distribution networks. The implementation of global enterprise resource planning systems, now common in large companies, has challenged managers to use all of this information. Operations and supply chain analytics involves leveraging this information for making decisions related to resources such as inventory, transportation, and production

3. Managing customer touch points. As companies strive to cut costs, they often scrimp on the customer support personnel (and training) required to effectively staff service departments, help lines, and checkout counters. This leads to the frustrations we have all experienced, such as being placed in call center limbo seemingly for hours, getting bad advice when finally interacting with a company rep, and so on. The issue here is to recognize that making resource utilization decisions must capture the implicit costs of lost customers as well as the direct costs of staffing.

4. Raising senior management awareness of OSCM as a significant competitive weapon. Many senior executives entered the organization through finance, strategy, or marketing, built their reputations on work in these areas, and as a result often take OSCM for granted. As we will demonstrate in this book, this can be a critical mistake when we realize how profitable companies such as Amazon, Apple, Taco Bell, and Southwest Airlines are. These are companies where executives have creatively used OSCM for competitive advantage.

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Questions: 1. What are the Current Issues in Operations and Supply Chain Management?