Services
Financial Services
Financial services firms (banks, brokerages, and insurance companies) all have very real supply chains with a downstream flow of products (such as financial instruments like stocks, bonds, and CDs), services (accounting for monies in customers’ accounts), and the delivery of monies themselves (dividends, annuity checks, foreign currency, and other instruments). Financial stock exchanges are even an inspiration for e-commerce-based supply chain concepts in which large numbers of buyers and sellers convene to set prices fairly. Financial markets play a major role in traditional supply chains as manufacturers try to hedge price fluctuations related to commodities and currencies. The point is that the customers of financial services firms depend on the orderly delivery of financial services in the same way that a manufacturer depends on the orderly delivery of component parts.
Internet Services
Even companies in the virtual world of bits and bytes have supply chains. The supply chain of a pure online dotcom business would include all the service providers that support it, such as web-hosting companies, website designers, fulfillment centers, call centers, and other service providers. And even the most virtual e-business is dependent on suppliers of computers, networking hardware, and software. The supply chain for e-commerce can also be viewed in terms of the flow of hits from one website to another. For example, the whole basis of banner advertising is to shuttle potential customers from website to website. When Barnes & Noble buys a banner ad on Yahoo, it is asking Yahoo to supply Barnes & Noble with access to customers in the form of a certain number of page views. Every time a click-through to Barnes & Noble occurs, Barnes & Noble pays Yahoo, and every time a viewer from Yahoo buys from Barnes & Noble, Yahoo gets paid. In many ways, Yahoo (and many other free Internet services) could be considered a buyer and seller of page views—a distributor of page views. Clearly, Yahoo sells millions of page views to advertisers. From where does it get these page views? When web surfers go to a Yahoo web page, they give Yahoo a fully formed and finished page view that Yahoo distributes to one of its advertisers. Yahoo buys page views from consumers by giving them valuable information services. The company then closes the loop internally by converting advertisers’ dollars into the information services sought by viewers. The point is that there is a flow of page views (the product) from people sitting at their computers to Yahoo and then to Barnes & Noble and other advertisers. Consumers create page views, Barnes & Noble buys page views, and the middleman, Yahoo, distributes page views. These exchanges and activities form a supply chain, even though there is no physical product. E-commerce companies have suppliers, and they have customers. They pay supplier companies to obtain specific things, and they are paid by customers for particular things.
Local Governments
Every taxpayer is a customer to whom municipal and county governments deliver a range of products and services. These include utilities... such as water, sewage and drainage systems, electricity, and fire and police services. They also include infrastructure... such as roads, bridges, and parks. Therefore, the business of government involves a very real supply chain, for municipalities or other agencies need to obtain everything from patrol cars and asphalt for roads to flowers for park gardens and uniforms for their firefighters. Local governments also frequently function as distributors for their supply chain partners; that is, they manage contracted services, such as specialized health, education, and welfare programs for their state government or for national programs.