Use Demand Management To Improve The Supply Chain Performance

All stages involved in fulfilling a customer request, include suppliers, manufacturer, transporters, warehouses, wholesales, retailers, customers themselves and the interaction between them form a supply chain from product to consumption. Since the market's globalization and operation being more and more professional, competition between enterprises has shifted to the level of supply chain. The key problem of enterprises' survival has became how to improve the supply chain performance.The article elucidate how to improve the supply chain performance focusing on the demand management. By using demand management, one can collaborate the benefits and activities of each members inside the supply chain, analyze and manage the whole supply chain network. Taking the customer demand as the base of operation, the overall supply chain can achieve the optimal performance. Demand management includes two contents: one is the marketing tools that can be used to influence the demand, such as the pricing, sales promotion, product classification, shelf management and other special methods; the other is the interaction of all members inside the supply chain who use the marketing tools work tightly to gain the maximum benefits of the supply chain.The key successful factors of demand management can be classified into three primary categories:a. The basis for demand management value creation;b. The modeling constructs of demand management;c. The properties of the system as it is implemented and used.E-business has emerged as a key enabler to drive the demand management and the supply chain integration. E-business can bring all members of the supply chain work closely by information integration, synchronized planning and coordinated workflow, finally reached the target of demand management and supply chain integration - improve the performance of the overall supply chain.