Supply Chain Management and Innovation - Essay Example

Though the concept of innovation is not an unknown or new concept for many of the organizations, the old fashioned strategies that were adopted in the olden days may not suit to today's business environment. In order to improve the performance and profitability, today, organizations are required to involve in the most exciting innovative experiments. This would definitely help them create a nice future for the organizations failing which they may not be able to compete with the increasing competition and other innovative competitors.

Though most of the companies believe that innovation is one of the factors that help the organization perform and achieve huge profits, it is revealed through a recent study that only 25% of the organizations across the world believe in innovation being the key strategy for the organization's success. Actually, this approach should not be followed. The organizations and all the employees of the firm are required to give the highest priority to innovation in order to sustain the competition and achieve higher profits and also to perform better.

(Supply Chain Management) 2. Poor cross-firm integration and collaboration lead to supply chain planning problems. This situation was faced by a company called Leitax, a consumer electronic company. In order to overcome the problems in integration, the company introduced a new system that helps it resolve the existing problems and create better integration among the different functions of the supply chain. The major benefits of increased-integration are better information-sharing, accurate planning and also aligned execution of the plans.

Information sharing doesn't simply mean sharing of information among different members. The scope is much broader. Sharing of information requires a lot of attention to be paid to aspects like behavioral dynamics of the operations management. Along with integrating the information requirements for planning within the supply chain, coordination of systems can also help in upholding the organization differentiation that is perceived by the various stakeholders. In a dynamic and yet challenging supply chain environment, a consensus forecasting system can be advantageous in buy-in integration and many other similar concepts.

Operationalizing the integration as a functional alignment can yield better results to any organization. Alignment is always a positively influenced by collaborative engagement. Alignment encouraged by collaborative engagement can be more important than achieving, superior performance along such dimensions as speed or accuracy in individual information processing steps of the S&OP process. (Watson)Bibliography1. Supply Chain Management. Sypply chain management case studies. 3 November 2007.

12 November 2007 .2. Watson, Rogelio Olivia and Noel. Cross functional Alignment in Supply Chain Managment. 6 Spetember