SCOR Model Different Levels

"Plan" consists of Demand/ Supply planning and Management. What this level basically does is establish a relationship between resources and requirements. Since they are directly proportional it studies both factors to establish if they are equal. After this it plans the demand and supply chain and communicates the plan to the whole supply chain, including the source, make, deliver and return. This process also involves managing business rules apart from data collection, capital assets, regulatory factors, and compliance. Basically this step aligns the Supply Chain Management plan to the financial plan.

"Source" consists of scheduling deliveries, receiving the stock, verifying them and transferring the product respectively. It also manages business rules, assesses the supplier’s performance and credibility, collects data and maintains it. In addition to this, it also keeps information pertaining to inventory management, products coming in, capital assets, import and export policies, supplier’s network, and their agreements.

"Make" schedules production activities, decides how much has to be produced, and it also deals with packaging, shipping, and finishing the product. Apart from these it also manages production issues, manages rules, performance data, production network, equipment and facilities provided for them. It also deals with transport issues and compliance for production.

"Deliver" is something which comes into contact with the customer. A good example of this is handling customer inquiries, deciding the volume that has to be delivered. This is a crucial step as the customer comes in contact with the Supply Chain Operations Reference model. Apart from this it also routes shipments and deals with warehouse management, receiving material and picking it up for shipping. If necessary, the business can receive the product and install it at the client's site. This is called end-to-end servicing.

Returns may occur due to various circumstances in a business process. Most common of all is defective products. All defective products that are returned are put through different steps of evaluation after the return, and this includes identifying the product condition, disposing of the product, scheduling product shipment and returning the defective product. Sometimes it also involves the transferring of the defective product. All return maintenance of products and their repairs are sourced from the above steps of the return process.

A different category in the same returns process is excess products. This is where the Supply Chain Operation reference model plays a large role. The whole Supply chain management functions are finally used to cut down excess. Apart from damaged products and returns, even excess is a very large factor that contributes to returns. The whole study of the Supply Chain Management functionalities is on how to control these excesses. The excess is created at the inventory level, and the inventories are studied in detail. If the inventories are controlled using the demand and supply scale, then surplus can be cut down to a large extent, as much as 70% according to industry experts. Because there is less, you can spend more time and resources dealing with damaged products. The one thing that can be controlled is the production of excess.

From this understanding, the Supply Chain Operational Reference Model creates steps from the source such as identifying returned products, developing product authorization codes, and managing return business rules. Compliance is a stage that every process has to go through irrespective of the mode or the step. To summarize, the SCOR Model is like a language which communicates within the supply chain partners.

What happens at different levels of the SCOR Model?

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