the second reflective statement of E-business

From the module 2 of e-business, I have known much more about how to make every application work together in order to make the whole process of e-business more efficient. Instead of reviewing the contents of what I have learned from module 2, I would like to share some my real feelings and deeper thoughts about the second module.
The lecture of supply chain management let me feel really impressive; especially the videos from YouTube, those made me know the process of supply chain management for e-business clearly. And at the second half of the lecture, we were formed as different groups to choose the supply chain management process of a product or service, and drew a flow chart. We chose cheese to analyze, from the raw material collecting in farms to finished products selling at supermarkets. The flow chart made a very clear and general image of the supply chain management. However, for cheese which is a daily basic and relatively simple product, based on our flow chart, there are 3 to 4 procedures for delivering the products to different places, and the main problem is how to preserve it in an environment which is to make it freshest and most tasty. Therefore, from the perspective of supply chain management of fresh produce, cutting the procedures of the whole supply chain is necessary, not only for keeping the freshness, but also for cutting cost. Moreover, to compare with the supply chain management for fresh produce, managing supply chain of online stores is a much more complex operation. For a large online store, there are many customers order different kinds of products every minute, besides processing variety data of different orders and different supplies, the operation centre has to guarantee the quality of every product. Also, at the same time of screening the suppliers, keep the prices as low as possible is the goal, because this is the core advantage of online shopping. What to be noticeable is that Amazon has built its own supply chain and logistic centers which are all over the world; this could not only help to manage supply chain more efficiently and correctly, but also would help to deliver the orders the customers more timely. Before this lecture, I thought supply chain management is just to control suppliers and storage, and put the products in a truck and deliver to those people who need them. Actually, it is a very complex process and need technical tools to assist.