G. Baourakis
     Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania,
     Studies Co-ordinator of the Economic/Management Sciences and Marketing Department
     baouraki@maich.gr
 
     M. Stroe
     M.Sc. student at the Economic and Marketing Department,
     Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania
     monicastroe@maich.gr

This article explores the two different facets of Supply Chain Management (SCM) – the operational, focused on accelerating the flow of inventory and information through the supply chain and the strategic, describing the supply chain management as the integration of all activities associated with the material and information flow both up and down the supply chain through improved supply chain relationships, to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.
The first part of the article refers to the latter dynamic - strategic. It reviews of the underlying steps of the emergence and development of SCM and it continues with a discussion about the six marketplace dynamics driving the development of SCM and their influence on the marketplace.
The second part of the article refers to the operational aspect of SCM – a warehouse location problem – a common distribution aspect. The problem is to identify which warehouses should be used, how customer demand should be assigned to them and what products should contain. The objective is to locate the warehouse in the way that will minimize total distribution cost while meeting product demand at specified customer service level.
The problem is a multi-commodity production-distribution problem formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming problem based on Benders decomposition.

Keywords: Supply chain management, Information and Communication Technologies, E-commerce, Strategic Alliances, Warehouse location, Mixed-integer linear programming.