ROLE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN SUPPLY CHAIN [Year] MANAGEMENT

Prepared by, Abhishek kr Singh (12bsphh010029) Ankit Agarwal (12bsphh010128) Anubhuti Anil (12bsphh010170) Harshit Sheth(12bsphh010375) Neha Katyal(12bsphh010611)

Role of Information Technology in Supply Chain Management

Supply Chain Management (SCM) is concerned with the flow of products and information between supply chain members organizations. Recent development in technologies enables the organization to avail information easily in their premises. These technologies are helpful to coordinates the activities to manage the supply chain. The cost of information is decreased due to the increasing rate of technologies. The use of information technology (IT) is considered a prerequisite for the effective control of todays complex supply chains. Because, today companies are often not considered independent entities, but parts of multi-company, multi-echelon networks, i.e. supply chains, delivering goods and services to the final customer. Companies today are under pressure to better manage the supply chain to improve efficiency and logistics operations while remaining responsive to changing market conditions and customer demands. As a result, organizations need to adopt IT to support their supply chains and increase their efficiency by achieving tighter cooperation over the supply-chain. Importers and exporters need to know where their products are. Lenders need to know when and how to pay for it. Innovative companies have sprung up to harness the power of the IT, making it easier than ever for the logistics managers to track and manage international shipments, and to serve their changing needs as they reach ever further across the globe t source goods. Companies such as Home Depot, Xerox and Sears already use on-demand, Web based data hubs to identify where their goods are in real-time, and if delays along the way should be corrected to avoid broader supply chain disruptions and expensive recovery work. IT plays instrumental role in bringing together multiple technologies and integration them to optimize various scenarios n SCM. For instance when Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is used with IT, the combination promises to enable an automatic collection of supply chain data for optimization purposes. The above combination makes it possible to implement finely grained and immediate collection of data, which in turn enables more detailed and precise analyses on the Business Intelligence (BI) side. A connection of RFID, IT & BI has powerful business potential that goes well beyond incremental operational improvements. The combination for tracking & tracing, and sensor technologies additionally enables the identification and localization of root causes for quality issues. The benefits of a combination of IT, RFID and BI on the manufacturers side lead to efficiency gains within production environments. Overall, the results indicate that it has powerful business potential that goes well beyond incremental operational improvements. SCM & IT are inseparable & incomplete without one another. IT, internet and its tools have enables supply chain to prosper & become an aid to the Supply Chain Manager. The IT tools combined with each other provide ability to the supply chain manager to take informed decision in real time.