Supply Chain Managment

Nike was founded in 1962, by Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight originally started as Blue Ribbon Sports. Nike is global company trying to improve competitive advantage through strategically managing and utilizing its supply chain. Nike Inc. is the world's leading designer and marketer of authentic athletic footwear, apparel, equipment and accessories for a wide variety of sports and fitness activities. Nike is successfully using supply chain management.

Supply chain management is the management of the interconnection of organizations that

relate to each other through upstream and downstream linkages between the processes that

produce value to the ultimate consumer in the form of products and services. All supply chain management shares one common, and central, objective - to satisfy the end

customer. All stages in a chain must eventually include consideration of the final customer,

no matter how far an individual operation is from the end customer. Each operation in the chain should be satisfying its own customer, but also making sure that eventually the end customer is satisfied. The objective of supply chain management is to meet the requirements of end customers by supplying appropriate products and services when they are needed at a competitive cost. Doing this requires the supply chain to achieve appropriate levels of the five operations performance objectives: quality, speed, dependability, flexibility and cost.

Supply chain is very important because of flow of goods from one destination to other destination with cost effective and on timely delivery of goods to the business needs and gives the profit to the organization.

Supply Chain consists of many trading partners, from raw materials to finished products. Typical supply chain is denoted as below,

Supplier-->Manufacturer-->Wholesaler-->Retailer

Top management is The highest ranking executives responsible for the entire enterprise. Top management translates the policy(formulated by the board-of-directors) into goals, objectives, and strategies, and projects a shared-vision of the future. It makes decisions that affect everyone in the organization, and is held entirely responsible for the success or failure of the enterprise.

Taking the SCM philosophy from theory to practice seems to be a difficult task for companies, despite the many obvious advantages discussed. And often mentioned key enabler, and a necessary prerequisite for performing SCM in real life, is top management support.. top managers have a significant impact on realizing and developing a company's SCM practices; without proper top management support, SCM will be nothing more than a promising theory.. Top management should be understood here as a function rather than