Supply Chain Management and The Wholesaler

The business of being a wholesaler is more complex than most people might imagine. The industry is about more than just selling things to customers. Like many other things that appear simple at first glance, there’s a lot to learn about the business of being a wholesaler and one of the more important concepts is called Supply Chain Management (SCM).
The concept of SCM is relatively new to the industry having only just come into play in the 1980s. In a nutshell, the idea behind SCM is the inclusion of every party that interacts in a transaction in the process.
The thinking behind SCM goes like this. If every partner in the transaction process (from the original supplier all they way through to the customer) has the information about the entire supply chain at their fingertips, each level of input along the way will be about the entire chain and how to better it rather than just one individual aspect. Of course the real goal of SCM is to maximize customer satisfaction by utilizing the resources in the most efficient way possible.
The SCM philosophy has several offshoot ideas that have become very familiar to those working in and around wholesaling. One of the more common of these is the Just In Time (JIT) way of thinking about logistics or the way goods get moved around. JIT logistics is all about only having what you need in any one location at one time. In other words, there is a large amount of and shipments and orders that are placed on a more immediate basis which is in direct contrast to the days where wholesalers kept a bed of product stored in the warehouse.
SCM is a concept that many wholesalers will be familiar with and quite possibly will be the only system some of the younger people in the industry have worked with.