Abstract This paper discusses the eficiency issues in purchasing, manufacturing, and transporting over various stages of a supply chain such as supplier selection, production, and distribution. To address the eficiency questions, we group the supply chain into six independent areas. Four of these, vendor management, scheduling, inventory management, and transportation, are related to the product low, whereas network design and information sharing are non-low related. Keywords: Eficiency, Supply Chain Management Efic iency Issues in Supply Chain Management S.K. Bhatt*, C.R. Bector**, S.S. Appadoo*** *Professor Emeritus, Department of Supply Chain Management, Asper School of Business, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. Email: skbhatt@cc.umanitoba.ca **Professor Emeritus, Department of Business Administration, Asper School of Business, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. ***Assistant Professor, Department of Supply Chain Management, Asper School of Business, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. Email: ss.appadoo@umanitoba.ca Introduction For the last two decades, the business organisations are facing unprecedented challenges to improve eficiency or productivity. The Black Monday of October, 1987 came as a warning to the business world to ind better ways to do business and the advent of personal computer added to the competition among the organisations to affect re-engineering. Even business ethics took its toll and we saw the collapse of Enron and world dot com through their cooked up books. The recent stock market crash since the middle of 2008 added fuel to ire that caused bank failures and shortage of liquidity and investments. Several factors came in to the fore: cure the lagging proitability, improve the bottom line, improve the short-term share holder’s proit, and the fear of merger. Governments, industries and businesses have embraced downsizing and outsourcing as primary cure. Downsizing has appeared in different paradigms such as restructuring, reengineering, re-hosting, life-sizing etc. The ideas of productivity, eficiency, effectiveness, performance, quality, best practices and lexible organisations and systems became the common paradigm of doing business. Even the then Prime Minister of a socialist country such as India, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was coining the word “utpadakta” meaning productivity during the turn of the century. In this section we will explain various terms mentioned above, that add to the success of a business. The concept of eficiency, effectiveness, quality, productivity and overall organisational performance in some form or the other has occupied researchers in economics as early as 1957 (Ferrell), in management science (Charnes et al., 1978), productions operations (Eilon, 1987, Sumanth, 1988), organizational behaviour (Proctor et al., 1994) and in accounting (Sherman, 1988) etc.). Eficiency is the totality of the outputs that can be obtained from an economic unit. Effectiveness is however, a nebulous concept. Bhatt et al. (2004), while deining the overall productivity measure of performance of Canadian orchestras in 12 cities, did discuss what the meaning of effectiveness might entail. One component of effectiveness is the amount of the earned revenue generated and the number of audience brought in. If these results are measured against inputs provided, this measure would be used as eficiency. This, of course, is using ‘eficiency’ in a particular way. It does not measure other potential aspects of eficiency- the number of musician hours used to rehearse and perform music, the generation of largest possible audience with the fewest possible performances or creation of the most media exposure for the smallest possible advertisement buy. Then, there is a question and the role of quality. If the quality of the product or performance is not up to the satisfaction, it will result in fewer audiences down the road or a line up for the return of the tickets or products. Maarten (2008) comes up with a general system theory explanation that