Supply chain management is an emerging concept in the business environment, but it has

significant role and importance in enhancing the organizational efficiency and productivity. In

general sense, we can define supply chain management as the integration and communication

between the functions and organizations to create value for the ultimate customer. As we know

that any business organization is surrounded by factors and forces which have direct or indirect

impact on the functioning of the organization. Those factors and forces are the elements of

business environment. All those factors and forces that have impact on the functioning of the

organizations can be divided into internal and external. The factors and forces within the

organizations are the internal environment of the organization and the factors outside from the

business organizations are external environment. Internal environment consists of the vision,

mission and goal of the organizations, employees, culture, discipline, etc. and external

environment of the organizations includes customers, suppliers, shareholder, political factors

such as political institutions, ideology, pressure groups, government, technological factors,

economic factors, legal factors and socio-cultural factors. All these factors have connection to

the day to day operation of the organization either directly or indirectly. And these components

form the ecosystem of the organization within which the organization operates its business and

survive. Efficient and effective communication is essential for maintaining proper coordination

and scalar chain among the organizational hierarchy and organizational resources.

A business ecosystem is the network of organizations — including suppliers, distributors,

customers, competitors, government agencies, and so on — involved in the delivery of a specific

product or service through both competition and cooperation. Each entity in the

ecosystem affects and is affected by the others, creating a constantly evolving relationship in

which each entity must be flexible and adaptable in order to survive, as in a biological
ecosystem. The business ecosystem consists of a network of interlinked companies that

dynamically interact with each other through competition and co-operation to grow sales and

survive. An ecosystem includes suppliers, distributors, consumers, government, processes,

products and competitors. When an ecosystem thrives, it means that the participants have

developed patterns of behavior that streamline the flow of ideas, talent and capital throughout the

system. All these components of the business ecosystem are interlinked with the chain of

network known as supply chain.

The term "supply chain management" first appeared in 1982 (Oliver & Webber). Around 1990,

academics first described SCM from a theoretical point of view to clarify the difference from

more traditional approaches and names (such as logistics), to managing material flow and the

associated information flow (Cooper et al., 1997). The term supply chain management has grown

in popularity over the past two decades, with much research being done on the topic (Ashish,

2007).

Supply chain management is the control and organized flow of material, information, and

finances as they move in a process from supplier to manufacturer to wholesaler to retailer to the

end customer. The ultimate goal of effective supply chain system is to reduce the inventory and

waste. With the help of sophisticated software systems such as ERP, it’s easier to track flow of

all the activities in supply chain management. Supply chain management flows can be divided

into three main flows:

a) The product flow

b) The information flow

c) The finances flow

The product flow includes all the movements of goods starting from supplier to the customer.

The information flow related to the fill up the demand, location providing services and

feedbacks. And finally, the finance flow deals with all the payments, consignment and title

ownership arrangements (SCM, 2010) (Waters, 2009). Supply chain management is a very

complex process, thus, to keep the productivity flow smoothly and focusing on the weak area in

a chain, as there is always room for improvement.

The institute for Supply Chain Management defines supply chain management as ‘The design

and management of seamless, value-added process across organizational boundaries to meet the

real needs of the end customers and plays a vital part to ensuring customer requirements are

met.” Managing the flow of products and services within the supply chain in the parcel industry

is the integral part of the postal department. Supply chain management covers all aspects of the

Post Offices’ parcel industry, which include the movement and storage of parcels, the in-house

storage of parcels at different warehouses and final delivery of parcels to customers at the end of

the supply chain. A crucial element to supply chain management is also related to the ease and

efficiency of which information is distributed throughout the supply chain, where different

organizations throughout the supply chain are able to operate efficiently ad mitigate any possible

risk will ensure that customer satisfaction is achieve, as well as ensure that the

organizationsdownstream are able to minimize any losses in products and ultimately reduce

losses(Monczka, R., Handfield, R., Giunipero, L. and Patterson, J., 2015. Purchasing and Supply

Chain Management. Cengage learnign)