Supply Chain Cost Management Studies

More and more attention is paid to supply chain (SC) and supply chain management (SCM) in recent years. Some famous international enterprises, such as Dell and IBM, have achieved great successes in practice of SCM, which makes people believe that during 21century SCM will bring enterprise competition advantage. In fact, SCM has grown into a managerial system of thoughts from a managerial tool based-on activity. Nowadays SCM is seldom applied in China, but the existence of SC is objective. As China has been one member of WTO, SCM will prevail in China very soon. Researches into SC both domestic and foreign mainly focus on supply chain model-made technology, supply chain management technology and supply chain management supporting technology, but supply chain cost management (SCCM) is not yet emphasized. Because of the improving of manufacturing cost management methods day by day, it is difficult to increase profit through raising labor productivity and economizing resources. So it is necessary to find a new source of profit. And SCCM can act on. So the author illustrates some ideas about SCCM. Firstly, the author glances through the history of cost management development, introduces both SC and SCM briefly, and draws the conclusion that the fourth stage of cost development is SCCM. Secondly, the author thinks SCCM during constructing SC has two sides: diminishing single enterprise cost through developing core competence and outsourcing; cutting supply chain cost through choosing supply chain cooperative partners. Then, the author points activities-based cost management (ABCM) as the basic model of SCCM, and emphasizes lessening supply chain cost dramatically through business process reengineering. Lastly, the author regard supply chain cost culture as the foundation of SCCM, which makes human, cost value, cost theories and cost system becoming a united body in the process of SCCM.