What is the difference between supply chain management and traditional business management?

1. Gap in the source of decision-making information (multi-source information)

Production planning is based on certain decision-making information, i.e., basic data. In the traditional production planning decision-making model, planning decision-making information comes from two aspects, on the one hand, demand information, on the other hand, resource information. Demand information comes from two aspects, one is the user order, the other is the demand forecast. By synthesizing the information from these two aspects, the demand information needed for production planning is obtained. Resource information, on the other hand, refers to the constraints for production planning decisions. In later discussions, we will see that the concepts of demand information and enterprise resources in the supply chain management environment are different from the traditional concepts. Information multi-sourcing is the main feature of production planning in supply chain management environment. In addition, resource information in the supply chain environment comes not only from within the enterprise, but also from suppliers, distributors and users. The constraints are relaxed, and the expansion of resources expands the optimization space of production planning.

2. Decision-making model gap (decision-making group, distributed)

The traditional production planning decision-making model is a centralized decision-making, while the decision-making model in the supply chain management environment is a distributed, group decision-making process. Multi-agent based supply chain system is a three-dimensional network, each node enterprise has the same status, there is a local database and domain knowledge base, in the formation of the supply chain, each node enterprise has the right to temporary monitoring and decision-making, each node enterprise's production plan decision is affected by the other enterprise's production plan decision-making, need a coordination mechanism and conflict resolution mechanism. When an enterprise's production plan changes, it is necessary for other enterprises to make corresponding changes to their plans, so that the supply chain can get synchronized response.

3. Gap in information feedback mechanism (progressive, chain feedback and parallel, network feedback)

Enterprise plans can be well implemented, need to be effective supervision and control mechanisms as a guarantee. To carry out effective supervision and control must establish an information feedback mechanism. The traditional enterprise production planning information feedback mechanism is a chain feedback mechanism, that is, information feedback is from one department to another department within the enterprise linear transmission, due to the characteristics of the hierarchical organizational structure of the transmission of information is generally from the bottom to the high-level information processing center (power center) feedback, the formation of the organizational structure and the formation of parallel information transmission mode of the hierarchy.

The information transfer mode of enterprises in the supply chain management environment is different from that of traditional enterprises. The multi-agent organizational model characterized by teamwork makes the supply chain have the characteristics of networked structure, so the supply chain management model is not step management, nor matrix management, but networked management. The transmission of production planning information is not along the internal hierarchical structure (power structure), but along the different nodes of the supply chain (network structure). In order to achieve the synchronized operation of the supply chain, the frequency of information interaction between the supply chain enterprises is also much larger than the frequency of information transfer in traditional enterprises, so the parallelization of information transfer mode should be used.

4. Differences in the operating environment of the program (uncertainty, dynamics)

The purpose of supply chain management is to enable enterprises to adapt to the needs of the dramatically changing market environment. Complex and changing environment, increasing the uncertainty and dynamic factors of enterprise production plan operation. Production planning in the supply chain management environment is carried out in an unstable operating environment, so the production planning and control system is required to have a higher degree of flexibility and agility, such as the flexibility of the lead time, the flexibility of the production batch, etc.. The traditional MRPII lacks flexibility because it copes with the uncertain market environment with fixed environmental constraint variables, which is obviously not feasible. Production planning in the supply chain management environment involves mostly order-based production, which is more dynamic. Therefore, production planning and control should take more into account the uncertainty and dynamic factors, so that the production plan has a higher degree of flexibility and agility, so that enterprises can make a rapid response to market changes.