Strategic supply chain management : theory of structure choices, demand and operational performance

Abstract

Manufacturing today is becoming more globally organized business and dominated by large international companies so that it is difficult to say that a finished product belongs to a particular final assembler. Rather, it would be more correct to say that products belong to the supply chain. Competition today is being typified less by firm versus firm and more by supply chain versus supply chain. The distinction between supply chain management and traditional operations management lies in two dimensions of integration and coordination - organizational integration and flow coordination. The fact that the one of the basic business principles underlying the Japanese management system is mutual obligation explains why Japanese companies enjoyed competitive positions during 1980s. And now it is revealed that it was the management system, not a country````s culture, which made the difference and it was exportable. Although it has been shown that information technology itself did not bring significant increase in productivity in the past decades, it provides a powerful technological infrastructure for the companies in a supply chain to integrate or break the organizational boundaries which was not available about twenty years ago. This thesis is largely composed of three parts: firstly, it reviews and summarizes basic theories related to choosing supply chain structure. Since supply chain management is in its infancy as a management science, we attempted to reexamine and reorganize relevant theories such as transaction cost economics and resource based theory from the supply chain management point of view. Secondly, we introduced academic and practical issues connected to supply chain operations. Issues include Just-In-Time, Efficient Consumer Response, and Information Technology (IT) as an enabling technology. We also introduced the lock-in or hold-up problems between IT solution providers and users (firms) or between supply chain and constituent firms. Finally, we...