Supply Chain Management Journal 2010, Volume 1, Number 1

The ECR is a happy mixture between management, marketing and ethics. The relationship between ethical conduct an law sometime is confusing. Some would rationalize that actions within the law are therefore ethical and perfectly justifiable. But an “if it’s legal, it’s ethical” attitude disregards the fact that the law “codifies only that part of ethics which society feels so strongly about that it is willing to support it with physical force”.

changing, business ethics, legal behavior, ECR

June 2010, pp 1 – 6

SCM is a concept presupposing to engage the customer, to consider the enabler and to think creatively, developing and deploying a sustainability strategy, the corporate strategy being a pattern of converging decisions and actions of the firm in order to improve key process capabilities. Today there is an increasingly critical influence on the strategic business outcomes of the supply chain strategy and execution, being critical to focus the supply chain team on driving value across the enterprise and being necessary to build an adequate supply chain. Supply chains have become increasingly complex and time-sensitive, the economic success the company being intertwined with the actions of its suppliers and applying value chain principles creating customer value and competitive advantage thanks to an adequate combination of a superior supply chain, committed customers and loyal consumers. At the level of the new partnership between producer – distributor – consumer it is pledging for identifying a set of capability standards to ensure both shopper satisfaction and organizational effectiveness. Assessing strategic options in the today evolving business environment presupposes taking into account the supply chain design as the ultimate core competency of an organization, by designing and redesigning the company’s chain of capabilities for a series of competitive advantages. ECR means simultaneously increasing value to the consumer, while improving supply chain performance for distribution channel members by a better coordination between marketing, production, and replenishment activities. By reducing lead-times, improving service levels and decreasing costs, collaboration can improve the number of satisfied customers. If the organizational success is depending on the role of supply chain management, consumer behavior brings also an essential factor toward future organizational viability, so that it is important to sense the demand, being close enough to the consumer as to receive its preferences and signals as early as possible. In these times of financial stress and related recessionary pressures there is a real need: to become more demand-driven; to make fundamental changes in the way of thinking about the supply networks; to treat supply chain thinking as a philosophy that pervades the entire company.

value chain, ECR, SCM

June 2010, pp 7 – 15

Waste management has come to stay as one of the most controversial, well researched and analyzed subject of the modern industrial world. With production and commercial activity on an incessant rise, it is natural fallout for the quantity and the nature of waste products to change dramatically, raising a global concern. Nowadays problems connected with waste and their impacts on natural environment are very important, especially because of raising volume of industrial waste. So there is a strong need to take up activities allowing for industrial waste management, which state for proper waste managing. Industrial waste management is the collection, transport, processing (waste treatment), recycling or disposal of waste materials, in an effort to reduce their effect on human health or local aesthetics or amenity. A sub-focus in recent decades has been to reduce waste materials’ effect on the natural world and the environment and to recover resources from them. The reverse logistics concept is modern solution using in industrial waste management. By realization of logistics processes in waste management it is organized in better way and allows for receiving materials which are going back again to the forward logistics processes as an input.
This paper analyses the main definitions of waste and characteristics of industrial waste, with statistical data for Poland. Than it presents waste management conception After that the Authors show main ideas of reverse logistics and proof that proper realization of its processes support and improve industrial waste management.
Problems presented in this article are quite new and modern, because logistics literature studies shows that there is lack of connections between reverse logistics and industrial waste management and such topics are taking up very rare.

reverse logistics, waste, industrial waste, waste management, reuse resources

June 2010, pp 16 – 19https://drive.google.com/file/d/15-uN_VPjHRTWDFJpjCpSlZSX3Pt9n8aS/view?usp=sharing

Collaboration takes place when people from different organizations (or from units of organization) produce something together trough effort, resources and common decisional processes
and share product or final service responsibility.
The future evolution of collaborative excellence in the consumer products value chain will likely reside in the attainment of new growth structures founded on innovation.
Strategic alliances are associations between more independent companies which choose to administrate a project or a particular activity trough coordinating of competencies.
To create synergy, we require more than a concept and a strategy. The enterprise value proposition defines the strategy for value creation trough alignment, but do not describe how to achieve it. The alignment strategy must be completed with an alignment process.
Supply Chain Management encompasses the planning and management of all activities involved in sourcing and procurement, conversion, and all logistics management activities.
ECR – Efficient Consumer Response: Working together to fulfill consumer wishes better, faster and at less cost (ECR Europe).
Business process management is a complex management practice that many organizations find difficult to implement and progress to higher stages of maturity.
SCOR combines elements of business process engineering, benchmarking, and leading practices, into a single framework. Under SCOR, supply chain management is defined as these integrated processes: PLAN, SOURCE, MAKE, DELIVER, and RETURN from the suppliers’ supplier to the customers’ customer, and all aligned with a company’s operational strategy, material, work, and information flows.

collaborative management, collaborative excellence, alignment processes, Supply Chain Management, Efficient Consumer Response, Business Process Management, Process mapping, redesign process project, business process maturity, SCOR Model, return process

June 2010, pp 20 – 34

Modern trade in Romania in the last five years experienced a great evolution, both as number of units, eg. from 3 hypermarkets in 2003 to 108 in 2010, as well as number of customers and market share. Diversification of retail activity and increased of Romanian customer interest for these new forms of retail concepts were threatened for the first time in 2009. Starting with this year general
tendency was to maintain the level of sales and market positions obtained.
The actual situation of the market brought at international level radical changes in business environment for retailers as well as for their suppliers. The most important ones referred to the type of buying process and consumers behavior. A set of studies on the consumer behavior showed that 84% from them were forced to changed their buying behavior in the last year. In this recession time not only the spending budgets for fast movement goods will be lower, but their behavior will be focused on product with high value add, along with maintain in the future of tendency toward discount stores.
The objective of this paper is to understand that nowadays the competition in retail market should be judged not in terms of relationship between prices and costs at a point in time but rather in terms of the capacity to innovate over time leading to longer-term gains in quality, convenience and price. Surveys have shown that convenience became first consideration in determining whether a consumer maintains or switches loyalty from one supermarket or type of shopping to another.
Thus supermarkets and hypermarkets are facilitating reductions or qualitative improvements in the un-costed time expended by the consumer through the growth and rapid development of infrastructure for home shopping. In order to outline the most important directions of applying innovations by Romanian retailers in production activities, for revolutionizing logistics of supermarkets activity or for reorganizing supply I used several types of analytical methods based on data from marketing studies and I applied comparative analyses with situation and evolution of modern trade businesses from other different countries.

innovation capacity, modern trade, market share

June 2010, pp 35- 44

The retail sector in Romania has developed as a successful business especially after the setting up of large sales areas. The evolution’s on the market are profound and have an impact on the structure of the market, consumer behavior and the usage of labor force. Beyond the positive effect of the emergence of new jobs (new in denomination, as well as content) problems specific to development have also emerged: the market’s insufficient capacity to supply competent employees, the lack of specialized managers, training, too great a difference between superior level salaries and inferior level salaries. Companies were forced to manage in this difficult context and to innovate in many cases in order to sustain their own development. Despite the economic crisis manifested at global level, the great retailers must deal with the challenges of finding a balance between increasing labor productivity, reducing costs and improving the consumer’s experience.

retail sector, personnel management, consumer focused commerce

June 2010, pp 45 – 50

In the current economic crisis, superimposed on that of overproduction, which takes more time, more companies are facing serious financial difficulties. Oversupply is sent to markets increasingly contracted, increasing the difficulty of selling their products. Income population is reduced, leading to lower demand. Already many companies have exhausted internal growth opportunities. Such conditions affect the approach to address market. Without building real partnerships, long-term, based on trust is difficult to conceive of success in business.
A specific type for partnership in business is the supply chain. Originally, it appeared as a solution for better organization and coordination of activities of large companies, currently are developing between organizations, with purpose to increase the competitiveness of firms involved. With technological progress in contemporary competitiveness relies significantly on the price at which products are offered in markets. For similar products the price is becoming increasingly a tool of differentiation. As such, designing a supply chain as a value chain contributes to obtain competitive prices for products by eliminating unneeded or unnecessary activities, or by outsourcing activities inefficient. Concentration of companies upon supply chain activities for which they have distinctive competence leads to reduced overheads. Therefore, the consequence is the possibility of obtaining lower-cost products, a prerequisite for lower prices and greater competitiveness.
At present, power of retailing companies is very large, dominating in many cases firms from other sectors. Conflicts between the major distribution groups and their suppliers are known. Authorities seek legislative solutions to problems, but they mostly do not lead to real benefits for consumers, leading to other complaints. Construction of supply chains based category management is a viable, proven business success achieved by larger companies. Assortments design, internal arrangements of the retailing firms, organization on new principles of activities based on new relationships between retailers and suppliers in terms of consumer interests are solutions to increase the competitiveness of firms involved.

supply chain, competitiveness, category management, outsourcing, integration, flow

June 2010, pp 51 – 62

Distribution systems can be sources of competitive advantage for manufacturers of goods and services, for national and local economies. In designing these systems must be analyzed the factors that make buyers choose the place and the way of making purchases. In a general approach, we can consider the buyer being in a position to choose between buying goods in a traditional store or through e-commerce.
The results of certain studies presented in this paper were analyzed in terms of e-commerce merchantability of products, and customers need for information and value creation possibilities. Based on these facts, companies can create different types of e-commerce sites, taking into account as well the client’s expertise.
Depending on the value that manufacturers aim to provide to customers, it might be necessary to redesign distribution processes and create a close collaboration among participants in the supply chain management.

commercial merchantability, economic merchantability, added value, site interactivity, client expertise, data safety, information security, new information and communication technologies

June 2010, pp 63 – 75

Telematics systems market for Road Transport and Traffic Telematics (RTTT) involving telecommunications, particularly cellular telephony, has gained momentum due largely exponential growth in the number of developers of systems, solutions and applications, and diversity of mobile terminals. Mobile providers will be involved in transport, develop various products and services in order to succeed in a competitive market. Objectives of standards in this area include providing a means of communication (common language on technical and contractual issues), public protection, increased health, hygiene and environmental issues, promoting trade and reducing consumer spending targets that are protected by stringent specifications. Since the standards have considerable potential in terms of efficiency, safety and improving user comfort, organized action is necessary to promote standardization in these areas.

telematics, standard, road, communications, traffic, geographic localization

June 2010, pp 76 – 87

Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing (Time-Driven ABC) was introduced in 1997 by Kaplan and Anderson in order to provide more precise information on costs and profitability of products / services and allows, as its promoters claim, to understand better and lower the costs, complexity of the activities of an enterprise using the “equations of time.”
This paper presents the results of a case study on the implementation of Time-Driven ABC in a distribution company from Dambovita, concluding that the method can be used for complex and dynamic activities, which characterizes the logistics of distribution companies.

activity-based costing, time-driven activity-based costing, distribution, time equations

June 2010, pp 88 – 97

The System Identification (RFID) is experiencing a great development in recent years been used in various applications. Radio frequency identification gaining popularity because the systems can be embedded (the readers can identify the label without colliding with obstacles such as paper, wood, cement and RFID tags can be encapsulated in such objects), can be read / written by remote (along with the ability to read, and data can be written on the label without the need for a physical link between them) and can perform multiple readings (the information can be processed by multiple tags simultaneously). The technology can be used to identify a wide variety of objects. Radio frequency identification is used in many applications, including systematic campuses, airports by identifying objects, traffic management and vehicle access control in private areas, service management, the sorting conveyor, sorting on the conveyor belt, sorting by Lift etc. Microchip technology and invention led to the design and use of passive RFID tags (tags that can be read without the need for energy sources), thereby reducing costs.
In recent years identification systems are often used in the industrial machines, the transport equipment and supplies, personnel and security administration, as well as any other field where objects need to be identified.
In the paper will be presented some applications of RFID theology namely: service management, sorting on the conveyor belt, sorting by Lift etc. All applications submitted sites using passive tags. For application “Service Management”, each device is installed in service took a tag, which will be read by a reader, when brought into service for repairs.
Identification number is corresponding inventory. It is delivered to a computer where can generate various reports and statements such as: file repair, cost per repair, and total cost of repairs, replacement parts list and other.
Sorting on conveyor belt: Tags attached to products have sites whose code was coded destination. Products can be sorted in any direction. They are randomly placed on the tape. The band has a fork with a centrally placed separator. Sorting through more than two directions, each of the two bands is divided into two other bands, for each screening is used the same method. For each bifurcation is necessary each reader. The technique can be used in factories for sorting and delivery, sort the luggage at airports, wherever there is sort of conveyor belt.
Sorting by Lift: Goods transported by train, boat etc. and unloaded in ports or stations must be sorted by recipient. Transport trucks are made by recipients. Each package of goods has attached a
tag whose ID is encoded in the destination. Trucks lined the platform so readers can read the tags.
The advantages of these applications are: Using a computer for reception, entrance and exit to / from the service is quick and without human error, reduce the cost of reception, screening times decrease, eliminate human errors, fast delivery, etc..

radio frequency identification (RFID), ID tags, RFID tags, antenna, wireless communication

June 2010, pp 98 – 108

The new millennium’ s consumer is more informed, more aware of his rights, more concerned with the effects of the unsustainable development, more suspicious but more eager for stability, certainty and quality. Increasing consumers’ satisfaction, loyalty and enthusiasm will equally depend on reasonable and fair costs of products and services as well as on added value, trust attached to the organizational trademark. This change of the nature of relationships between business and society determines companies to be more concerned with the creation of a durable competitive advantage.
The strategies of social responsibility oriented towards increasing the quality of human capital can create a clear, coherent and reliable reputation which should stimulate consumers’ preference and loyalty. Human values, “as contemporary coin of commerce”, imply a new strategic approach which should aim at relevancy both for the consumer and for the other stakeholders of the organization, through the creation of a chain of actions and interactions leading to social and economic development.

ECR, social responsibility, quality, durable competitive advantage, strategy

June 2010, pp 109 – 120