If a customer is happy with the way their return process was handled, they’re 70 percent more likely to become a repeat customer. A smooth return process means a good supply chain, one that is properly connected and involves interaction along the chain. The whole business benefits through higher-order rates, good sentiment in the customer's thought process, and smaller cost-to-serve for the company.

Supply chain management could be identified as the procedure of delivering a solution from raw content to the customer. It includes supply operations planning, sales, supply management, demand planning, product planning, and planning. 

In this era of globalization where businesses compete to offer probably the best quality products to the clients and meet all their demands, supply chain managing plays an extremely important role.

The organizations that form the supply chain are "linked" together through bodily flows and info flows.

Physical flows involve the transformation, action, and storage of materials and goods. They're the most obvious part of the resources chain. But just as important are info flows.

Data flows, on the other hand, let the different source chain partners coordinate their long-term plans, and then manage the daily flow of materials and goods up and down by the supply chain.

The supply chain management system is composed of 4 main parts:

1. Demand management: Demand planning is the process of forecasting demand to make sure products can be reliably delivered. Effective demand planning can provide better accuracy of revenue forecasts, align inventory amounts with troughs and peaks in demand, and improve profitability for a specific channel or perhaps product. Demand management consists of 3 parts: need preparation, trade promotion preparation, and merchandise preparation.

2. Supply management: Supply management is made up of five areas: supply planning, production planning, inventory planning, capacity planning, and distribution planning. Supply planning determines how better to fulfill the needs created from the demand plan. Inventory planning determines the optimum quantity as well as the timing of inventory to arrange it with product sales and output needs. Capacity planning establishes the production staff and equipment required to satisfy the need for merchandise distribution preparation and network preparation oversees the motion of items from a dealer or producer to the point of sale.

3. Sales and operations planning: With an eye on financial and business impact, the goal is to enable executives to make better-informed decisions through a dynamic connection of plans and strategies across the business. Often repeated on a monthly schedule, that enables good supply chain management and concentrates the materials of a company on delivering what their clients need while remaining profitable.

4. Product portfolio management: Product portfolio management is the process of creating a product idea creation to market introduction. A business should have an exit strategy because of its product when it gets to the conclusion of its lucrative life or in case the solution does not sell very well. Product portfolio management contains New item introduction, End-of-life planning, Cannibalization preparation, Commercialization and also ramp preparation, Contribution margin evaluation, portfolio, Brand, Portfolio management, and platform preparation.

History-based forecasting is used to generate supply chain planning, but AI and machine learning are primed to change that permanently. AI and ML-based predictive models are going to transform processes as need realizing, shaping, and orchestration, in addition to supply planning. AI will start driving dynamic pricing, and product introductions that are new will likely be based on predictive sector intelligence. AI and ML will drive new designs for product offer management, and also reactions to disruptions in the supply chain. AI and ML predictions are going to play a major role down the road of supply chain activities and also have a transformative impact on various other business processes.

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