The traditional vision of Supply Chain management represents only one dimension of a business environment that is growing increasingly multidimensional. Modern day Supply Chain Management is the e-commerce of manufacturing. With the emergence of the Internet, customers seek out specific products they want at the prices they're willing to pay.

Modern supply chains focus on the customer. Manufacturers need to precisely gauge what a customer might want, how to package it and where to ship it. There is no such thing as one size fits all. When the customer wants a change, they need to be prepared to shift directions quickly. As a result, business and manufacturing processes need to be just as agile and scalable.

Manufacturers who do not adopt proven methods to succeed today may be out of business tomorrow. The Internet supply chain will be a means of communicating and doing business with suppliers and customers. Fractured, unpredictable supply chains have become less and less tolerable primarily because customers will not absorb the associated costs and long lead times.

It is important to bear in mind that your customer is just a mouse click away from your competitors. Enabled supply chains assist companies to optimize business processes both within and outside the four walls of the enterprise and to more efficiently deliver the new products customers want, when they want them and where they want them. Supply chain has been viewed as an inflexible series of events that somehow managed to get products out the door. It often involved questionable inventory forecasts, rigid manufacturing plans and hypothetical shipping schedules. The Internet has changed all that. It has transformed this old-fashioned process into something closer to an exact science.

An Internet-enabled supply chain helps companies, avoid costly disasters, reduce administrative overhead, reduce unnecessary inventory, decrease the number of hands that touch goods on their way to the end customer, eliminate obsolete business processes, reap cost-cutting and revenue-producing benefits, speed up production and responsiveness to consumers and garner higher profit margins on finished goods Effective integration of an Organizations supply chain can save millions, improve customer service and reduce inventories.

The key to getting optimum value out of automating your supply chain is to make sure you have your internal systems working well before you start extending them out over the Internet. One should envision the business as a whole including its current strategy and where it wants to go. Supply chain strategy is increasingly being integrated with overall corporate strategy. The cost of training people to use new software should not be underestimated. Sending information around the world takes lesser time than it takes to get into someone's mind.