Introduction
According to the definition provided by the author, the phenomenon of splitting presupposes that the entire supply chain of a specific entrepreneurship, the Gap Company in the specified case study, should be divided into two key processes, i.e., sourcing and logistics.
It should be noted that the specified design of the company’s operations is not quite popular among the rest of the companies; however, the leader of Gap still chose it as the key tool in organising the company’s processes and functioning. The reason for the choice of splitting was predisposed by the fact that the organisation did not actually need to select specific states to work in and, instead, should focus on choosing the organisations that it could work with.
Business Process Management
Among the obvious benefits of the strategy, the possibility to get the company’s priorities straight instead of using a stock set of principles for business management clearly takes the first prize. Indeed, the specified approach helps arrange the financial resources properly and identify the areas that need financing the most.
However, the above-mentioned approach also has its problems. By splitting the supply chain into sourcing and logistics, one will make the supply chain management process more complicated, as two separate areas will have to be supervised.
The case study shows that Gap’s key goal, which made the company leader choose to split the supply chain management process into two stages, concerned the need to find the means of sourcing products, as well as the locations that the products could be sources from. In other words, the company was obviously attempting at entering the global market and adjusting to the new environment.
One could argue that the method, which the organisation has chosen for the specified purpose, is far from what other companies traditionally use in order to become competitive within the global economy environment. However, when discussing the approach used by the Gap Organisation, it is worth keeping in mind that the company can be characterised by a rather complex system of sourcing; to be more specific, Gap has no other choice but to source from third-party contractors.
As a result, the company leader must make sure that the suppliers should be provided with enough freedom for making the decisions that enhance the process of retrieving and supplying the raw material to the company. Nevertheless, the method chosen by the company’s leader has proven to be quite viable. Even though it goes against most of the principles for supply chain organisation and management currently accepted in the global market, they clearly allow for the company’s evolution and promote success.
Conclusion
Seeing that the business process management, which Gap was involved in, concerned the split of the supply chain management processes into two major categories, one may assume that the company has handled the task quite well.
The separation of the issues related to the outsourcing and the concerns of the production and organisational processes allowed for not only promoting a rapid progress of the firm, but also locating its unique properties, which will make the company easily identifiable and make it stand out of the range of similar organisations in the target market.
Therefore, the process of integrating and the following split of the supply management processes worked perfectly for Gap, as it addressed the unique issues that the company faced by putting the company’s assets to a proper use.