Research issues in supply chain management

Supply chain management deals with the management of product, information and financial flows in a network consisting of suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and customers. An effective supply chain can offer a company faster response time to the customer, lower costs, higher levels of flexibility, lower inventories, lower levels of obsolescence and reduced demand amplification throughout the supply chain. Communication technologies have the potential to allow companies to integrate their globally dispersed supply chains by eliminating serial business processes and replacing them with more dynamic, flexible and visible business processes. Modeling complex and dynamic systems, such as supply chains, can offer the user better understanding and control of the system. However, the ability to model and understand these complex systems is a challenging research task. This paper discusses the characteristics of supply chain systems and introduces research issues associated with modeling such systems.