【正文】 following are five basic ponents for supply chain management. PlanThis is the strategic portion of supply chain management. You need a strategy for managing all the resources that go toward meeting customer demand for your product or service. A big piece of planning is developing a set of metrics to monitor the supply chain so that it is efficient, costs less and delivers high quality and value to customers. SourceChoose the suppliers that will deliver the goods and services you need to create your product or service. Develop a set of pricing, delivery and payment processes with suppliers and create metrics for monitoring and improving the relationships. And put together processes for managing the inventory of goods and services you receive from suppliers, including receiving shipments, verifying them, transferring them to your manufacturing facilities and authorizing supplier payments. MakeThis is the manufacturing step. Schedule the activities necessary for production, testing, packaging and preparation for delivery. As the most metricintensive portion of the supply chain, measure quality levels, production output and worker productivity. DeliverThis is the part that many insiders refer to as logistics. Coordinate the receipt of orders from customers, develop a work of warehouses, pick carriers to get products to customers and set up an invoicing system to receive payments. ReturnThe problem part of the supply chain. Create a work for receiving defective and excess products back from customers and supporting customers who have problems with delivered products. For a more detailed outline of these steps, check out the nonprofit Supply Chain Council39。re a manufacturer of consumer packaged goods for example, don39。t feed them accurate, uptodate information about customer orders from your retail customers, sales data from your retailer customers39。 demands. Supply chain execution (SCE) software is intended to automate the different steps of the supply chain. This could be as simple as electronically routing orders from your manufacturing plants to your suppliers for the stuff you need to make your products. For an expanded overview of this topic, read the Supply Chain Executive Summary. I need to have ERP software before I install supply chain software? This is a very controversial subject. You may need ERP if you plan to install SCP applications because they are reliant upon the kind of information that is stored in the most quantity inside ERP software. Theoretically you could assemble the information you need to feed the SCP applications from legacy systems (for most panies this means Excel spreadsheets spread out all over the place), but it can be nightmarish to try to get that information flowing on a fast, reliable basis from all the areas of the pany. ERP is the battering ram that integrates all that information together in a single application, and SCP applications benefit from having a single major source to go to for uptodate information. Most CIOs who have tried to install SCP applications say they are glad they did ERP first. They call the ERP projects putting your information house in order. Of course, ERP is expensive and difficult, so you may want to explore ways to feed your SCP applications the information they need without doing ERP first. SCE applications are less dependent upon gathering information from around the pany, so they tend to be independent of the ERP decision. But chances are, you39。s important to pay attention to SCE software39。 the idea that everyone you do business with could be connected together into one big happy, cooperative family. Of course, the reality behind this vision is that it will take years to e to fruition. But considering that B2B has only been around for a few years, some industries have already made great progress, most notably consumerpackaged goods (the panies that make products that go to supermarkets and drug stores), high technology and autos. When you ask the people on the front lines in these industries what they hope to gain from their supply chain efforts in the near term, they will all respond with a single word: visibility. The supply chain in most industries is like a big card game. The players don39。t trust anyone else with the information. But if they showed their hands they could all benefit. Suppliers wouldn39。t have to order more than they need from suppliers to make sure they have enough on hand if demand for their products unexpectedly goes up. And retailers would have fewer empty shelves if they shared the information they had about sales of a manufacturer39。s look at consumer packaged goods as an example of collaboration. If there are two panies that have made supply chain a household word, they are WalMart and Procter amp。80s, retailers shared very little information with manufacturers. But then the two giants built