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Modelling Strategic Business Decisions
Edited by Walter W. C. Chung, Kim Hua Tan and S. C. Lenny Koh
Introduction
In this highly competitive and dynamic marketplace, it is not good enough to only understand the customers or suppliers but must also include your customers' customers and your suppliers' suppliers. The development of supply chain and the logistics have shifted form the operational efficiency improvement inside the company to the integration of your customers and suppliers and to build up a seamless supply chain. In which all the parties collaboratively work together to achieve the best performance and value adding. Changes in knowledge management and supply management strategy are imminent in order for companies to be in line with the market trend so as to gain the market share as well as maintaining the profit.
Competition in the toy industry is extremely severe. The nature of toy products has been changed from being a consumer product to a lifestyle item. In order to survive in the extremely competitive toys market, the company has to shorten the product development cycle, build up supplier chain management and minimize engineering changes during the production stage. As [11] Smith and Reinertsen (1995) have pointed out companies could gain a bigger market share ahead of its competitors if the time required for their product to launch into the market can be reduced. It was also found that similar design demerits and quality problems will occur again and again during product development cycle or even in the production stage in the networked organization. It will be beneficial to the organization if engineers could get the knowledge from previous historical cases or from members of the enterprise network. Therefore, knowledge management techniques in the supply chain network should be applicable to enhance experience sharing within the company and the supply chain members and ensure that the right information is available to the right person at the right time.
Manufacturing in the information age
In today's manufacturing environment, discrete manufacturers were under pressure from customers to move away from the traditional "make-to-stock" production model to "build-to-demand" customer service model. This creates the need to leverage product information throughout the supply chain and greater visibility among the supply chain to ensure customization and rapid delivery...