Question

Supply chains exist in manufacturing, service and education along with virtually any organization. They are most easily defined for manufacturing operations and therefore serve as our typical examples. Identify a supply chain outside of the manufacturing industry and describe it in detail.

Answer 1

Supply chain refers to the process that moves information and material to and from the manufacturing and service process of the firm. These include the logistics process that physically moves product and the warehousing and storage process that position products for the quick delivery to customers.

The Supply chain is not only useful for the manufacturing industry but also helps in the services industry. Service organization are generally classified according to who the customer is, for example, individuals or other business and to the service, they provide(financial services, health service, transportation services and so on). Manufacturing has evocative terms to classify production activities such as intermittent and continuous production; when applied to manufacture setting, supply chain readily conveys the essence of the process.

The Service Supply Chain includes-

1)In designing services organizations we must remember one distinctive characteristic of services; We cannot inventory services. Unlike manufacturing where we can build up inventory during slack periods for peak demand and thus maintain a relatively stable level of employment and production planning, in-services we must(with few exceptions)meet demand as it arises. Waiting line models provide a powerful mathematical tool for analyzing many common service situations. Several major factors distinguish service design and development from typical manufactured product development.

• First, the process and the product must be developed simultaneously; indeed, in services, the process is the product.
• Second, although equipment and software that support service can be protected by patents and copyrights, a service operation itself lacks the legal protection commonly available to goods production.
• Third the service package, rather than definable good, constitutes the major output of the development process.

2)Like in manufacturing process flow design is a method to evaluate the specific process that raw material, parts, and subassemblies follow as they move through the plant, similarly, the standard tool for the service design process is flowchart which is also called as a service blueprint. The unique feature of service blueprint is the distinction made between high customer contact of the services and those activities that the customer does not see. for example, in banking service, the high contact system is a branch office where operations can be seen but in the Check Processing center of the bank, the customers are not involved in the majority of processing steps.