Strategies used by Leaders within the Supply Chain

Strategies used by Leaders within the Supply Chain
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Strategies used by Leaders within the Supply Chain
1.0 Introduction
Leadership is understood as the art of motivating people to act towards attaining a shared goal. Supply chain management necessitates a company’s leader to develop an effective supply chain strategy. Leadership is a vital function of supply chain management that helps to maximize efficiency and attain the goals of the company (Horth, Miller & Mount, 2016). An effective leader formulates a clear supply chain strategy that allows the organization to attain its overall goals and purpose. An organization’s supply chain strategy needs to focus on the efficient movement and transfer of inventory. The strategy is the only efficient way that can be used to balance the usually difficult-to-forecast pulls of supplier availability and customer demand (Birhanu, Krishnanand & Rao, 2018). This research paper explores the strategies that companies with effective leaders can use within their supply chain.
2.0 Strategies
Supply chains comprise the end-to-end flow of money, products, and information. As such, how they are managed greatly affects the competitiveness of an organization in several areas such as service perception, speed to market, working capital requirements, and product cost. In this context, Qi et al. (2017) pointed out that the right alignment of the supply chain of an organization with the company’s business strategy is of great importance to ensuring a high level of business performance. There are several strategies used by company leaders in their supply chains. However, the strategies used vary from one organization to another depending on the type of company. The supply chain strategies used by a retail company, for example, might be different from the ones used by a manufacturing firm. A company leader chooses the appropriate supply chain strategy for his/her company that will allow him/her to manage the business more effectively (Gattorna, 2016).
Strategy 1: Aligning supply chain with the company’s business goals
Company leaders align their supply chain with the business goals of their organizations by integrating corporate business planning with sales and operations planning. Even though processes of sales and operations planning enable coordination amongst distribution, manufacturing, as well as sales, some companies do have gaps and disconnects amongst operations, strategy, and finance (Lee, 2014). Some company leaders use integrated business planning involving technology, process, and people aspects of the organization to try to bridge these gaps. This process incorporates operations planning with a fiscal strategic forecasting and budgeting systems and enables sound trade-off decisions to be made (Prajogo, Mena & Nair, 2018).
The resultant marriage of end-to-end processes will ensure that sales objectives and budgets are corroborated against a bottom-up and comprehensive operating plan and implemented in a responsive manner. At the same time, the strategy reconciles the operating plan against fiscal objectives (Lee, 2014). True integrated business planning links the processes of sal...