Supply Chain Management (SCM) is a resident business process that amalgamates Customers with Providers using Customer Relationship Management, Demand Planning, and Service Management. SCM is an integrated series of activities that emanate from forecasting a demand, fulfilling the demand through manufacturing, enabling the procurement of supplies, delivery of the product and continuation of the support through post sale customer service.

Supply Chain Management (SCM), is an expansive wording, which can be understood by various users in many ways. From a customer perspective , SCM begins when the demand for a product is raised. The vendor responsible for selling the product inturn arranges to procure the product by reaching out to the manufacturing plant and fulfilling the demand. 

Let us now look at SCM from the vendor's eyes. The demand for a product is captured by the customer advisor, who transmits the quantity of products required along with a schedule of when to deliver. Supply Chain Management therefore kicks in at the conception level which takes the form of planning, manufacturing, procurement, order fulfillment, delivery, customization and post sale support.

From the first days of the Supply Chain as a management buzzword, SAP has been helping enterprises to secure their own resources through ECC, ERP Central Component . SAP SCM confirmed the strengthened milestones to include features and functions to support collaborative supply chain planning processes in order to address strategic, tactical, and operational planning as well as service parts planning.

SAP SCM covers broadly five main areas, which are critically attached to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) of a business.

1. Demand planning and forecasting
2. Safety stock planning and execution
3. Supply network planning and order fulfillment
4. Distributed planning and delivery
5. Supply network monitoring