In most businesses, it is often the same people doing the same job. When purchasing materials, the same routines are used on each occasion, even if every one of these purchases may be unique, so why do we need a supply chain policy and procedure manual?
Similarly, the steps of booking materials in the warehouse is same regardless of supplier and part number in most scenarios. A such repeated set of activities is called a process.
Professor Bo Bergman1 presents a more formal definition:
“a process is a network of activities repeated in time, whose objective is to create value to the external or internal customer”.
Any supply chain policy & procedure manual involve teamwork rather than assembly lines. Supply chain policy are largely a matter of co-ordination between people, that is, agreement between individuals who cooperate, and agreement about their competence.
In the supply chain, processes can be centralized and decentralized. When defining a supply chain policy, it is often a good idea to describe its characteristics. A supply chain policy should have a first activity and a final activity, a customer, and a supplier; and it is consists of a network of activities, produces a value-adding result at the end; and is repeated time and again.
While writing any supply chain policy you should consider these headings suitable to your business.
This heading should define the main reason drive or why you are writing this supply chain policy. For example, if you are writing a supply chain policy for ABC analysis then you might want to say “The purpose of this supply chain policy is to establish the rules of assigning market segmentation codes (ABC codes) to all the parts/SKUs in the business. ABC is driven by a consensus process balancing market needs (decided by historical patterns and future plans), customer agreements, and supply chain characteristics”
The scope defines what is included and excluded from the supply chain policy parameter. For example, in the ABC segmentation policy example, scope can be defined as “This policy doesn’t cover part obsoletion or reactivation, replenishment and inventory management details though these are tightly linked with ABC codes. These details will be covered in separate policies and work instructions”.
This heading is optional. In this section you can write about why this supply chain policy is established, what were the drivers and direction which lead to development of this policy.