Péter Németh
and
Péter Földesi

ABSTRACT

Surviving in today’s very competitive and expanding worldwide economy requires a skillful management that is capable of controlling and measuring supply chain performance. Extended supply chains have large amount of capital invested and high level of inventory that makes control, measurement and optimization an important issue for the world economy.

The object of the present paper is to explore the most effective structure for the control and measurement of supply chains and to give a systematic approach to design an efficient control mechanism for supply chains.

The majority of the former supply chain performance measurement methods underline the necessity of performance from the customers view [1][2]. These parameters are mainly quality-based; hence they describe logistics performance on strategic-global level. On the other hand in order to be able to measure the performance of the whole supply chain in an appropriate way, and to see the actual needed performance of the actors within the chain the quantitative parameters are also essential. It is vital to investigate what physical processes and parameters are needed to meet customer demands. With the physical (operational level) processes clearly identified and measured, the service quality and customer satisfaction are pre-determined.
In previous works various performance measurement systems were introduced; however for the effective use of these methods the exact knowledge of the measured supply chain is also needed. Without the exact identification of the supply chain the selection of the correct and useable performance measurement system is questionable. A structured methodology for choosing the right system for the right supply chain will be presented.

Next the complexity measurement of that given graph has to be elaborated in order the determine the conditions and circumstances of material and information flows, so that the ‘logistic space’ can be established in which the physical processes (warehousing, packaging, distribution etc.) and commercial and legal acts (quality control, customs etc.) are taken place.
Depending on the parameters of the ‘logistic space’, the relevant actors and the actual operation different control mechanisms can be found as the most effective solutions, bearing in mind that the final assessment of logistical performance in terms of quality and customer satisfaction on its own is not capable to give appropriate feed-back for the operation management and system design, since that aggregated parameters refer to the strategic level and provide no detailed information about the operative issues. The interference between the strategic and operative level has to be investigated and analytically described in order to find the optimal structure for allocation of logistic resources.