Consider a customer walking into a

Consider a customer walking into a Wal-Mart store to purchase detergent. The
supply chain begins with the customer and their need for detergent. The next stage of
this supply chain is the Wal-Mart retail store that the customer visits. Wal-Mart stocks its
shelves using inventory that may have been supplied from a finished-goods warehouse
that Wal-Mart manages or from a distributor using trucks supplied by a third party. The
distributor in turn is stocked by the manufacturer (say Procter & Gamble [P&G] in this
case). The P&G manufacturing plant receives raw material from a variety of suppliers
who may themselves have been supplied by lower tier suppliers. For example, packaging
material may come from Tenneco packaging while Tenneco receives raw materials to
manufacture the packaging from other suppliers