Supply chain management of Mark & Spencer Essay

Supply chain management of Mark & Spencer - Essay Example (Company Report 2008). Today, in businesses the world over, customer satisfaction lies at the heart of all modern thinking on quality and business management (Johnson et al 2007). Customers like a company’s suppliers are important stakeholders. â€Å"Stakeholders are those individual or groups who depend on the organization to fulfill their own goals and on whom, in turn, the organization depends† (JSW: 2005:179). Many corporate mission statements set customers as the focus of an organization’s business activities, while key thinkers have defined the quality of goods and services with reference to how well they satisfy needs and expectations of the customer base. At the other end, some companies are paying performance premiums (Christopher 2005, Mangan, Lalwani, &Butcher, 2008). These are companies that have failed to realize the strategic importance of their supply management processes. Such companies are victims of their actions as they have unintentionally set up conflicting objectives between engineering, marketing, purchasing and manufacturing that form barriers to good supply management (David and John1993P.1). This paper, examines the supply chain management functions of M&S. The next section of the paper presents a framework upon which the supply management functions of the enterprise revolves around. The paper looks into its relationship with the suppliers, its quality management system, its global sourcing principles, ethical trading, animal welfare and fare trade. The last part of the paper looks into the global sourcing principles, and how M&S can still remain competitive. As seen from the above figure 1, the activities of M&S is facilitated by a pool of suppliers and customers, dotted all over the world. With the ever growing scale of activities, suppliers in Europe were always grouped under Europe and the Scandinavian, though with