The phrase “Supply Chain Management” was originally coined by Keith Oliver in 1982 and subsequently gained increasing popularity as its usage was proliferated in books and language.
It was at that time I began my career. Again I had never heard of “Supply Chain” in those early days. I worked in Materials Handling, Packaging Engineering, Warehouse Space Planning, Resource Planning, Procurement, Inventory Management and Control, Production Control, Systems Management and other areas. But it was almost a decade before the phrase “Supply Chain Management” was more commonly used.
Nowadays I view SCM as involving most every aspect of any business. It is an umbrella term which encompasses the end-to-end aspects of Finance, Operations, Development, Sales, Manufacturing, Distribution, Customer Management, Supplier Management, Technology and I/T.
Supply Chain touches everything which is one of these reasons it is such an exciting field to be a part of.
But that being said there are still a large number of definitions of “Supply Chain Management”. Let’s review some of those definitions here:
