The Characteristics of Supply Chain Management. An Annotated Bibliography Review

Academic Paper from the year 2018 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: A-, Kenyatta University, course: Business Management, language: English, abstract: Over the past years, Supply Chains (SC) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) have been noted to play a crucial role in corporate efficiency, not to mention that they have immensely attracted the attention of several scholars. Due to the cropping up of liberalization as well as the globalization of the international trade, the production factors involved in sourcing and consumer products from destinations across the globe have enhanced the interdependence between the producers and wholesalers on the global supply chains. Accordingly, the literature behind supply chain management has offered a number of variations on the same theme in supply chain definition. In simple terms, supply chain management can be defined as a system of suppliers, retailers, customers, distributors and even manufacturers, whereby the products flow downstream from the suppliers to the consumers while information flows in both directions. On the other hand, a supply chain can be defined as a network of facilities as well as distribution options that operate to procure materials and transform these materials into intermediate and finished products, alongside distributing these finished products to consumers. Evidently, supply chains exist in the service and even manufacturing enterprises, even though the chain's complexity may greatly vary from firm to firm and industry to industry.