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Materials Management And Logistics

Introduction
Over the past decades more and more attention has been given to the concept of supply chain management (SCM). Steven (1989) looks at the supply chain as the connected series of activities which is concerned with planning, coordinating and controlling materials, parts and finish goods from suppliers up to the customers. This author extends the concept of business logistics to other tiers in the supply chain. Cooper and Ellram (1993) who present supply chain management as an integrative philosophy to manage the total flow of a distribution channel from suppliers to the ultimate user.

Lately, there has been a lot of research conducted in the area of supply chain and logistic management (Briscoe et al 2004; Kumaraswamy et al 2004; Wang and Xue 2004). Most of these studies emphasized the importance of close collaboration with various project parties in order to streamline the supply chain using e.g. partnership (Dey 2002), outsourcing (Rabinovich, Windle, Dresner and Corsi (1999), agent-based system (Tah 2005; Xue 2005), constraint-based planning (Chua et al 2003) and etc.

In relation to the case scenario (Appendix 1) which indicate that, many organization develop products or services in foreign countries and sell world wide. This strategy is known as global sourcing and is defined by Monczka and Trent (1991) as the integration and coordination of procurement requirements across worldwide business units, looking at common items, processes, technologies, and suppliers. Hence, this project is to analyze the role of materials management; function of logistics; inventory systems and JIY which follow by the case scenario.

Materials Management

The objectives of materials logistics management which are to reduce inventories while maintaining strategic stocks, improve product quality, minimize the total cost of operations and procurement, ensure service levels to customers and minimize variance materials flow (Naim and Towil 1994). Materials...