coordination and collaboration with channel partners, which may be suppliers, intermediaries, third-party service providers, or customers. Supply-chain management integrates supply and demand management within and across companies. More recently, the loosely coupled, self-organizing network of businesses that cooperate to provide product and service offerings has been called the Extended Enterprise. A supply chain, as opposed to supply-chain management, is a set of organizations directly linked by one or more upstream and downstream flows of products, services, finances, or information from a source to a customer. Supply-chain management is the management of such a chain. Supply chain visibility, in its origins, was concerned with knowledge of the location/production stage and expected delivery date of incoming products and materials, so that production could be planned, but the development of the term has enabled it to be used to plan orders using knowledge of potential supplies, and to track post-production processes as far as delivery to customers. Supply-chain-management software includes tools or modules used to execute supply chain transactions, manage supplier relationships, and control associated business processes. The overall goal of the software is to improve supply chain performance by monitoring a company's supply chain network from end-to-end (suppliers, transporters, returns, warehouses, retailers, manufacturers, and customers). In some cases, a supply chain includes the collection of goods after consumer use for recycling or the reverse logistics processes for returning faulty or unwanted products back to producers up the value chain. Functions Supply-chain management is a cross-functional approach that includes managing the movement of raw materials into an organization, certain aspects of the internal processing of materials into finished goods, and the movement of finished goods out of the organization and toward the end consumer. As organizations strive to focus on core competencies and become more flexible, they reduce ownership of raw materials sources and distribution channels. These functions are increasingly being outsourced to other firms that can perform the activities better or more cost effectively. The effect is to increase the number of organizations involved in satisfying customer demand, while reducing managerial control of daily logistics operations. Less control and more supply-chain partners lead to the creation of the concept of supply-chain management. The purpose of supply-chain management is to improve trust and collaboration among supply-chain partners, thus improving inventory visibility and the velocity of inventory movement. In this section, we have to communicate with all the vendors and suppliers, make some comparisons,