In: Operations Management
(a) Design and share an information flow map for a firm or department that you are familiar with
(b) analyze the information flow and identify some potential areas for improvement that could be enhanced using trends and components related to Industry 4.0. and be sure to provide a technical analysis/justification.
Introduction
Organizations adopt numerous business improvement methodologies to improve business performance. Logistics as well as supply chain management has been regarded to be the crucial factor for the companies to obtain competitive edge. In fact, logistics as well as supply chain management has received attention since the early 1980s, yet conceptually the management of supply chains is not particularly well understood, and many authors have highlighted the necessity of clear definitional constructs and conceptual frameworks on supply chain management. In this paper, we provide a tutorial on the current research of operations management of logistics and supply chain. We first clarify the conception of logistics and supply chain management in this paper, which defines the scope of our related research papers. The core of this paper is that we provide several hot issues in this field with examples to show how these researches contribute from different research angles. Finally, we conclude the paper with the insights obtained from our analysis and future study directions in this field.
Logistics
Logistics is the management of the flow of goods between the point of origin and the point of consumption in order to meet some requirements, for example, of customers or corporations. The resources managed in logistics can include physical items, such as food, materials, animals, equipment, and liquids, as well as abstract items, such as time, information, particles, and energy. The logistics of physical items usually involves the integration of information flow, material handling, production, packaging, inventory, transportation, warehousing, and often security. The complexity of logistics can be modeled, analyzed, visualized, and optimized by dedicated simulation software. The minimization of the use of resources is a common motivation in logistics for import and export.
Supply Chain
Compared to “logistics,” there appears to be even less consensus on the definition of the term “supply chain management.” Kathawala and Abdou point out that SCM “has been poorly defined and there is a high degree of variability in people’s minds about what is meant.” Nevertheless, we present a rather widely adopted definition, which is given by Mentzer et al.which is rather broad, not confined to any specific discipline area, and adequately reflecting the breadth of issues that are usually covered under this term: “Supply chain management is defined as the systemic, strategic coordination of the traditional business functions and the tactics across these business functions within a particular company and across businesses within the supply chain, for the purposes of improving the long-term performance of the individual companies and the supply chain as a whole.”