THE STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE OF SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT IN COMPARISON TO OTHER CRITICAL BUSINESS AREAS IN GERMAN MANUFACTURING COMPANIES

The paper analyses the importance of Supply Chain in comparison to other critical business areas within companies. Consulting Supply Chain literature always ultimately creates the impression that it "boosts" the company success by lower operational costs and sales growth by better performance. A quantitative literature review of the top 100 biggest German company reports gives the result that Supply Chain Management is a very important business area but customer focus, being defined as "Sales & Marketing" and the product itself (e.g. R&D) are more important for companies on a strategic level. The outcome therefore is, that there must be a good Sales & Marketing and product in the first place to ensure business success, leading to the fact the SCM can be understood as a major supportive function for manufacturing companies.