Supply Chain Management

In the face of the growing rate of globalisation processes, stronger competition and increased flexibility of business lines, companies have ceased to focus exclusively on what is happening within their own organisation. They have abandoned an egocentric approach, which was based on purely market-related, transactional relationships with their environment. One may conclude that thinking in categories of a network of dependence and relationships has unquestionably become one of modern management’s key paradigms — justified in the context of the global economy. As K. Obtöj states (2002, p. 64), the time of the ‘lone gunslinger’ is drawing to an end, the future is not in aligning with single companies as much as with networks of companies that collectively influence the standards of market operations. Therefore, the supply chain should be understood as a network1 of entities delivering the product (or service) to the market, end-customer or consumer. A variety of entities are involved in delivering the product to the market; they, either individually or in cooperation, carry out diverse processes; many flows are recorded within the supply chain structure itself. A detailed description of the supply chain requires application of the following approaches (Witkowski 2010, p. 13): subjective, objective, process-based.