Short answer, please give an example to explain what a supply chain is.

Supply chain: refers to the contact or business contact of all stakeholders before the goods reach consumers. It is a functional network chain structure around core enterprises, which connects suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and retailers to end users by controlling information flow, logistics and capital flow, from purchasing raw materials to manufacturing intermediate products and final products, and finally delivering products to consumers through sales networks. The business philosophy of supply chain management is to seek the overall optimization of supply chain from the perspective of consumers through cooperation between enterprises. Successful supply chain management can coordinate and integrate all activities in the supply chain, and eventually become a seamless integration process.

Supply chain can be described as a leafy tree: production enterprises form the roots; Exclusive agency is the main pole; Distributors are branches and treetops; The tree is full of green leaves and safflower, which is the end user; On the nodes of root and main pole, branch and pole, the common thread is information management system, which circulates again and again.

The relationship between enterprises in supply chain is similar to the food chain in biology. In such a simple food chain as "a grass, a rabbit, a wolf and a lion" (for convenience of discussion, it is assumed that only these four creatures exist in this natural environment), if we kill all the rabbits, the grass will grow wildly, the wolf will starve to death because of the extinction of the rabbits, and even the most powerful lion will slowly starve to death because of the death of the wolf. It can be seen that every creature in the food chain is interdependent, and destroying any creature in the food chain will inevitably lead to the imbalance of this food chain and eventually destroy the ecological environment on which human beings depend.

Similarly, in the supply chain "enterprise A- enterprise B- enterprise C", enterprise A is the raw material supplier of enterprise B, and enterprise C is the product seller of enterprise B. If enterprise B ignores the interdependence of various elements in the supply chain and pays too much attention to its own internal development, the ability to produce products is constantly improving, but if enterprise A can't provide him with raw materials in time, or the sales ability of enterprise C can't keep up with the development of enterprise B's product production ability, then we can draw the conclusion that enterprise B.