Tunis on October 30th, 2002
Abou Nawas El Mechtel hotel - Tunis
As they cannot live in isolation, enterprises have become more and more bound to one another by a succession of events, from the supply of raw materials, through to the consumption of the finished product, thus constituting a closed looped system in which logistics and the management of the flows of goods and related information are of paramount importance.
In the current system, the distributors are required in order to maintain their customers to reduce costs and try to get the manufacturers to bear the classic expenditures, while the manufacturers seek improvements downstream to share with their customers and concessions upstream on the part of their suppliers. All the actors involved thus run into the pitfalls of :
- a set of recurrent concessions since only the final customer reaps the benefit of their labours;
- the accumulation of the defects of their respective systems, namely :
- the slowness of implementation deadlines,
- the obligation to offer discounts in order to boost coonsumption,
- the excessive dependence relating to storage for supply,
- the cumbersome load of paperwork and duplication of redundant stages with no added value,
- the multiplicity of useless costs
It is, therefore, necessary to introduce another logic of interaction between the various actors of a same logistic chain and to expplore the possibilities of achieving economy with each other, including with the final consumer, and this by bringthing them together within a network that will subsequently become a model of efficiency, eliminating all useless tasks or those without added value, reducing stocks as well as minimising administrative work as much as possible within a coherent and a proactive system where everybody gains thanks to the new ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies).
It should be pointed out that the performance factors of the enterprise do not lie exclusively in an exponential increase of its physical growth and its manpower. Rather, they lie in new and immaterial factors, such as its creative potential, its know-how capital, its anticipation of maket trends, its capacity for a prompt response to demand …
One of the areas of strategic management of the entreprise, allowing a development of the value creation chain, consists in implemention a global logistic strategy or Supply Chain Management (SCM). Belonging in knowledge engineering, SCM recommends cross process organisation and client directed management, with the enhancement of performance, competitiveness and production of value being based on communication, co-ordination and co-operation between the actors of the logistic chain
SCM upgrades team learning through the enhancement of individual and group expertise, the development of the capacity to react and to anticipate, as well as through innovation by hybridisation, thus contributing to a situation in the organisation where the whole is larger than the sum of the parts.
The present seminar is an invitation to consiider and debate a key topic of strategic management of the enterprise today. In the wake of the multiplicity of concepts and the proliferation of technological offers, enterprises are at a loss as to the bases and criteria on which to construct their organisation choice. One of the objectives of the present seminar is to help decision-makers and enterprise managers to gather cognisance of the stakes pertaining in SCM as a function and, secong, as a methodological approach for the implementation of a high-performance organisation supported by appropriate technological solutions.
The conferences have been selected in such a way as cover in the most didactic manner the thematic spectrum of logistics, ranging from the overall context in which the enterprises operate, through the evolution of the place held by the logistic function in production and in distribution, to the presentation of a methodological approach of integration and of the establishment of appropriate technological tools.
