Excellence in Global Supply Chain Management: Understanding and Improving Global Supply Chains

This book complements the other Excellence in... titles, for example, in Procurement, in Supplier Management, in Supply Chain Management, in Inventory, in Freight Transport, Services Procurement and in Warehouse Management. The real fact today is that we do actually live "in a global village" where many countries' former self-sufficiency has now moved onto a global stage. We can now find that distance impacts from local sources can soon grow into global problems. Witness for example, the increased price of steel around 2005 and the economic recession that started in the USA in 2008, which by early 2009 had adversely affected most global trade. Managing supply, demand and consumer markets from global perspectives therefore involves dealing with constant change and increased volatility. It also requires a new understanding of culture and different ways of doing things. No longer are organisations able to assume their national values; new processes can be enforced, or are going to be automatically adapted globally. We explore, in this book, how to manage such differences practically.