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In an aggressively competitive world, companies irrespective of their size and spread stand out on the basis of their effectiveness in supply chain performance. Supply chain being the vital component in an organization’s success factor, they strife to meet the challenges by adopting productivity initiatives, customization, vendor management and other technology oriented tools and practices.

Made up of three entities – customers, producer, and the suppliers, the supply chain process is all about purchasing, production and order fulfilment. Considering supply chain management as the process of placing the right item in the right place at the right time, the best practices becomes very business specific. However, with number of tools available in the market to choose from, success of the supply chain management system depends on the thorough understanding of the operations involved, the uniqueness of the constraints, and the best return on investment.

In today’s globalized business world, the supply chain management solutions has to be fast, adaptable and one which can be easily integrated with the changing business dynamics. Organizations need to have effective supply chains, or networks, to compete in the global market and networked economy. However, with technology playing a major role in every aspect of the business world, understanding technology implications and its role in the support of supply chain process is very important. However, since one size does not fit all, the supply chain professionals need to consider the mission-critical functions, key business processes and their logical integration with other business process and supply chain partners.

To achieve a great performance, organizations need to take care of their customer order fulfilment process, which forms the backbone of the supply chain. However, the best practices of supply chain management is a combination of a number of factors such as distribution network configuration, distribution strategy, trade-offs, integration of processes to share valuable information, inventory management and cash-flow.

In today’s techno-savvy environment, the global organizations are benefited by cloud- based supply chain management systems and automation software, which automatically handles the to-and- fro distribution of all goods from various locations across the globe and seamlessly integrates the order fulfillment value networks participants. Further, this also helps with real-time visibility into the end-to-end logistics flow leading to reduced transportation costs, environmental impacts, shorter lead times and better control.