Supply Chains: A Manager's Guide

Chapter 2. The Rules of the Game

Supply chain management is a difficult game to master. It requires you to move a great many pieces in very specific ways, and you have to choreograph those moves to make each piece arrive in the right place at the right time. It's also a game that plays out on a grand scale, with a playing field that spans the entire planet. Fortunately, the rules of the game—the descriptions of the pieces and the ways they move—are simple enough to be summarized in a few pages. In a nutshell, supply chains consist of production and storage facilities connected by transportation lanes, and they exist to support the flow of demand, supply, and cash. The difficulty of managing supply chains comes primarily from the complexity that ...