Understanding Supply Chains: Concepts, Critiques, And Futures

Understanding Supply Chains This page intentionally left blank Understanding Supply Chains Concepts, Critiques, and Futures Edited by STEVE NEW and ROY WESTBROOK 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Oxford University Press,  The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN --- ISBN ---x (pbk) Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk PREFACE The future of supply chain management looks even more fantastic than the recent past (Quinn : ). As we approach the st century, one thing becomes strikingly clear: Supplychain management is not the wave of the future. It is a tsunami that will engulf everything in its path . . . (Institute of Management Accountants : ). . . . Conventional ideas of ‘supply chains’ are a gross oversimplification that do more harm than good (Lamming ). There is no doubt that the emergence of Supply Chain Management (SCM) has been a major development in management thinking and practice. It has become an established feature of management education, a professional field with its own magazines and journals, and is claimed by some to be ‘a new way of thinking’ (Quiett ; La Londe ). However, many writers observe that it is a field characterized by imprecise terminology, sloppily applied metaphors, and conflated or confused concepts. The slightest skim of the many of literatures that use the term reveals a wide range of interpretations: There are hundreds of different formulations, nuances, and taxonomies for the ‘supply chain’, and dozens of near-synonyms. In an earlier paper (New ), one of the editors of this volume mapped out different common usages of the term, including the flow of a product or commodity through a sequence of firms or locations, a web of commercial relationships (for a particular firm, or for a network of firms), a multi-echelon inventory/logistics system, a label for particular corporate management functions (e.g. warehousing, purchasing), an orien