Globalization is the main goal of every company, especially a start-up one. Every manager wants to create a company that will be able to compete in the world market with the business rivals. Our company is a start-up that has US and International expectations. To maintain our expectations, we should arrange our global supply chain management department to be able to enter the country and later the world market.
So, to start the negotiations with the other companies, we should arrange lots of businesses, the main of which are the logistics services, supply chain, strategic planning, transportation, import and export operations. All these items are very important in global supply chain management and cannot be removed. So, let us give brief information about them.
According to Long, logistics “is a part of supply chain process that plans, implements, and controls the efficient, effective flow and storage of goods, services, and related information from point of origin to point of consumption in order to meet customer requirements” (2003). Logistics cares about the things delivering to the place where they need to be. But we should not mix logistics with transportation.
Transportation is one of the parts of logistics. It may be even said that transportation creates more difficulties than logistics. (Long 2003) Transportation is closely connected with planning.
To understand logistics and transportation better we should refer to global sourcing and the question of why companies want to enter the global market. Long gives several explanations to this phenomenon: international customers, international competition, law regulations, economies of scale, and newly expanded markets.
Strategic planning aims to create the future orientation of the company, its business plan and to cover other sides of the business. To make strategic planning, the managers of the company should answer three questions: “Who we are?”, “Where do we want to be?” and “How are we going to get there?” (Long 2003) The strategic plan is usually created for four or five years, and as better, it is made, the better results the company could reach. The whole company’s work and the work of every department should be organized according to this plan.
So, all the enumerated items are very important in the scheme of global supply chain management. The process or structure of the supply chain can be presented in the following scheme on the example of the car industry:
So, looking at the scheme we may make a conclusion that “supply chain management is the way the links are integrated to promote efficiency” (Long 2003).
“A firm’s global supply chain consists of multiple business partners across a wide number of countries” (Griffith 2005). The difficulties which the issue of global supply chain management can create are “the understanding of the unique need” of each customer and “the effective management of multiple relationships simultaneously” (Griffith 2005).
So, to create a distributional network for the company, which is going to enter the global market, the manager should do lots of work. First of all, the manager should make a strategic plan, which is going to be the business plan for the company for several years, and then organize the work of the related departments according to the plan.
Works Cited
Long, Douglas C. International logistics: global supply chain management. Springer, 2003.
Griffith, David A., and Matthew B. Myers. “The Performance Implications of Strategic Fit of Relational Norm Governance Strategies in Global Supply Chain Relationships.” Journal of International Business Studies 36.3 (2005).