A Model for Global Material Management using Dynamic Information

The supply chain is a world-wide network of suppliers, manufacturing plants, warehouses, distribution centers, wholesalers and retailers where raw materials are purchased, processed and transformed to be sold to customers. Customer satisfaction is highly dependent on the flexibility of the supply chain such as its ability to respond to changes in demand. Supply chain management (SCM) is currently mainly based on older information retrieval methods. It doesn’t take advantage of the ‘dynamic’ information that is now available due to developments in information and communication technology (ICT) and knowledge management (KM). Consequently, there is a disparity between what is being done and what can be done through the supply chain. This disparity can be eliminated in supply systems in the future by using the newly available dynamic information that will allow better synchronization of materials and resources flowing through the supply chain. One such system is an updated version of SCM, termed, for the purposes of this paper, Global Materials Management (GMM).