8.9 Managerial Issues

8.9 Managerial Issues
This section delineates the managerial issues that organizations may face in their efforts to employing supply chain management in their respective organizations.

1. Ethical Issues- It is true that conducting or employing supply chain management project in an organzation may result in the need to lay off, retrain and or transfer employees. Although, in general, supply chain management helps an organization streamline its operation, cut costs and increase overall company productivity, SCM results in activities mentioned above. Is it ethically justifiable to employ such project when a number of employees will be terminated? Is it just to share personal information in order to create an effective SCM? The answer to these questions is no.

2. How much to integrate?- Integration of supply chain segments may result in failure. This failure may include but not limited to the difficulty of utilizing and understanding technologies, inability of the technology to simplify processes that customers would be able to know easily, cost of maintaining such technology and among others. Instead of integrating the technologies of the company, the company itself may just want to connect any activities to ensure that each single activity is separate from each other and that each single activity is understandable and user-friendly for the users and customers.

3. Role of IT- SCM projects use information technology. Without IT, SCM efforts do not succeed. Oftentimes, technology plays the primary role in an organization rather than a supportive role, which should not be the case. However, without information technology, SCM efforts would not succeed. In short, there tends to be a problem as to what the role of IT truly is. The organizations must ensure that they recognize the fact IT takes the supportive role. This is because if for some reasons the information technology side of the company fails, the company itself fails as well.

4. Organizational Adaptibility- Because organization processes must conform to the software, not the other way around when it comes to adopting enterprise resources planning (ERP), some companies may have a difficult time adjusting when a new software is used. This is where dilemma exists. Some organizations have the capacity to adjust to new software changes, and some are not. Some organizations will be willing to adjust in order to utilize better software and some are not.

5. Going global- EC provides an opportunity to expand market globally. However, going global means that a company has to comply with different rules and regulations or laws set forth by different countries. This means that a company may have different kinds of operations in different countries. This also means that the costs associated with complying with the set laws might be high, which can create the organization's overall profitability and viability in the marketplace.

6. The customer is king/queen- It is always said that customers are always the top priority of organizations. Therefore, the organizations must ensure that even the smallest change of technology or adoption of it is easily understandable and beneficial to the customers. After all, it is the customers that make an organization survive in the globally-competitive marketplace. The organization must ensure that even though they are taking advantage of the benefits of the digital age, they must be aware that the end product must be customer-friendly.

7. Set CRM policies with care- In practicing CRM, a number of companies may give priority to more valuable customers (e.g. frequent buyers). Since frequent buyers are more of avid customers of the organization, the organization tends to give these customers discounts, coupons, and others. However, people may see this as a form of discrimination. People may think that customers should and must have equal opportunities that others get. Therefore, the organization must place care with its CRM policies to ensure that individuals are treated equally.