What Is Supply Chain Analysis (or Supply Chain Strategic Planning)?
No matter what business you are in, it's important to ensure that when a customer wants something -- say a product or service, that you have it available for the customer in a timely manner. If you don't, there's a strong risk that the customer will go to a competitor that happens to have what he or she wants.
Obviously, matching the needs of customers, and the supply (usually of products, but this can apply to services) is important, and requires planning. Supply Chain Analysis (or Supply Chain Strategic Planning) is a method to make this matching happen.
What is also probably obvious to you is that the complexity of supply chain analysis is going to depend on the type of business, business volume and a number of factors. Large retail companies, for example, often use sophisticated computer software to track and manage inventory on hand, to reorder products in a timely fashion, and to track customer purchasing patterns.
Smaller companies (let's say a Mom and Pop gift store) tend to try to match customer demand and supply on more of a gut level, using experience. For example, they know (or at least think they know) that customers will want certain things in December (due to the holiday season) than they will in June. So they plan how and when their suppliers will deliver those products.
While smaller companies probably don't need, or even want, to use very complex computer programs to do supply chain analysis, it IS useful to at least have some data about buying trends and shifts in order to use that information to manage supply. That data could be internally generated (product sales seasonally in a store), or more generic data may be available from third parties (for example, from a trade journal or report on trends in holiday season buying).