Just about every operation, company or non-profit, from the smallest to the largest, has some kind of supply chain. 

The effectiveness and efficiency of your supply chain is essential to developing customer satisfaction and ultimately it's an important contributor to your organization's bottom line.

Supply chains can be very complex. However, following best practices in creating your supply chain strategy can make management of your supply chain relatively simple.

The supply chain in most organizations has grown organically as the business has grown. Organizations seldom create a supply chain strategy from the beginning that integrates fully with their overall business strategy and is flexible enough to respond to inevitable market changes and economic disruptions.

Managers tend to view their organization's supply chain as linear, when in fact a supply chain has many dimensions and can be very complex. It's really more of a mesh than a chain.

It is always important to remember that your organization exists in a dynamic, not a static, business environment. So you can't design your supply chain just so it fits today. It has to be able to fit in a wide variety of situations.   

Getting the most of your supply chain is a multidimensional problem. The supply chain has impacts on your customer service and on your costs. You have to be able to effectively balance those two considerations.

It is essential that your supply chain strategy is totally integrated with your overall business strategy. The goal is to create a living, breathing supply chain that responds to a dynamic environment and does so in a way that satisfies your customers while at the same time delivering maximum bottom line performance.

Bringing to bear the right tools, the right skills and the right organization will enable you to manage this complex system in a simple and straightforward way.