
152 Principles of Supply Chain Management
to plan for both short-term and long-term requirements. In manufacturing, the traditional
way to provide response to the customer was to use inventories and order backlogs as
buffers. Today, the increasing emphasis on shorter lead times and greater exibility in
responding to customer orders has led to the rapid increase in lean manufacturing pro-
grams throughout many manufacturing sectors. With lean manufacturing programs,
there is an emphasis to reduce both order backlog and inventories; this makes the need to
integrate S&OP (demand management) an even more urgent consideration.
As previously mentioned ...