The Supply Chain Management Module integrates topics from manufacturing operations, purchasing, transportation, and physical distribution into a unified program. Successful Supply Chain Management, then, coordinates and integrates all of these activities into a seamless process. It embraces and links all of the partners in the chain. In addition to the departments within the organization, these partners include vendors, carriers, third-party companies, and information systems providers.ERP focuses on the problems within a single plant or company, SCM provides a solution to the problems and inefficiencies between companies or plants. Companies have implemented ERP to improve the efficiency of their internal operations, focus on the issues of communications and collaboration with suppliers, distributors and customers. SCM has evolved under such circumstances as a solution to improve the productivity of the total supply chain beyond the companys border.
Today, some main goals of SCM are as follows: on-time delivery for improved customer satisfaction, increased throughput of the entire supply chain (not of a single plant), reduced cycle times, minimized costs, and centralized planning and distribution execution.
Today, most SCM software tend to include the following sub-components :
Available-to-Promise
This is a quick material availability check that considers allocations, production, transportation capacities and costs in the total supply chain network.
Supply Chain Modeler
This is an easy-to-use graphical tool for modeling, navigating and controlling the supply chain network. An alert monitoring function to detect exceptions in the total supply chain network is usually provided.
Optimizer
The optimizer is the heart of the SCM system. It includes linear and integer programming, non-linear programming, heuristics and genetic algorithms.