The Supply Chain concept is one of the most important ideas to emerge in management research and practice in the last twenty five years. Organizations do not exist in isolation. Any organization, whether a large corporation, public body, or small business, which aims to meet the needs of its various customers and stakeholders will need resources in order to do this, and will acquire many of its materials, equipment, and supplies from other organizations. The performance of an organization is thus influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the actions of the organizations that make up the Supply Chain. There is no doubt that the emergence of Supply Chain Management has been a major development in management thinking and practice. It has become an established feature of management education, and a professional field with its own magazines and journals - a field with its own distinctive perspectives. 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 literatures that use the term reveals a wide range of interpretations, hundreds of different formulations, nuances, and taxonomies for the 'Supply Chain', and dozens of near synonyms. The purpose of this volume is to bring together insights from the leading researchers and thinkers on supply chain management to help move the field forward. It provides a survey of the key theoreticalconcepts which underpin the field, and presents critical evaluations of the underlying ideas and approaches. It will be an important resource for those active in researching in or applying the ideas of supply chain management, and for advanced students and their teachers.

A new title in the Routledge Critical Perspectives on Business and Management series, this Major Work is a four-volume collection of cutting-edge and canonical research about supply chain management.

This book provides a unique appraisal of supply chain management(SCM) concepts alongside lessons from industry, observation andanalysis gathered during the first decade of supply chainmanagement strategies in the UK construction industry. The research from leading international academics has been drawntogether with the experience from some of the industry's foremostSCM practitioners to provide both a definition of SCM and anoverview of its development as a strategy for managing constructionprojects. Key case study material - from Slough Estates to BAA and T5 -illustrates the benefits to the industry of its adoption. Littlehas been written on the application of SCM to construction and thisbook provides an agenda for discussion for both the experiencedresearcher and the industry practitioner by offering a thoroughgrounding in its principles as well as an illustration of SCM as amethodology for industry. Construction Supply Chain Management studies makes animportant contribution to the debate on innovative systems andtheir significance in increasingly complex constructionprojects.

Offering a refreshingly critical perspective, this text presents a balanced & concise account of the challenges & opportunities of international business. Extensive use of international case examples, demonstrating both good & bad practice, provides students with a realistic depiction of international business.

Closed-loop supply chain activities such as remanufacturing, recycling, dismantling for spare parts, and reverse logistics have helped many companies tap into new revenue streams by finding secondary markets for their products, all while reducing their overall carbon footprint. Written by academic experts, in language that is accessible to practitioners, this authoritative resource examines recent research and case studies of companies running profitable reuse/remanufacture operations in various industries. It illustrates profitable practices in returned and recovered products, clearly explaining how to: design a reverse logistics network, conduct production planning, implement effective marketing strategies, and apply closed-loop supply chain strategies in industries besides manufacturing. From product development to materials to assembly and profitability, this complete resource explores the impact of these processes across all aspects of the supply chain.

Traditionally supply chain management has meant factories, assembly lines, warehouses, transportation vehicles, and time sheets. Modern supply chain management is a highly complex, multidimensional problem set with virtually endless number of variables for optimization. An Internet enabled supply chain may have just-in-time delivery, precise inventory visibility, and up-to-the-minute distribution-tracking capabilities. Technology advances have enabled supply chains to become strategic weapons that can help avoid disasters, lower costs, and make money. From internal enterprise processes to external business transactions with suppliers, transporters, channels and end-users marks the wide range of challenges researchers have to handle. The aim of this book is at revealing and illustrating this diversity in terms of scientific and theoretical fundamentals, prevailing concepts as well as current practical applications.

Decision making at the enterprise level often encompass not only production operations and product R&D, but other strategic functions such as financial planning and marketing. With the aim of maximizing growth and a firm’s value, companies often focus on co-ordinating these functional components as well as traditional hierarchical decision levels. Understanding this interplay can enhance enterprise capabilities of adaptation and response to uncertainties arising from internal processes as well as the external environment. This book presents concepts, methods, tools and solutions based on mathematical programming, which provides the quantitative support needed for integrated decision-making and ultimately for improving the allocation of overall corporate resources (e.g., materials, cash and personnel). Through a systems perspective, the integrated planning of the supply chain also promotes activities of reuse, reduction and recycling for achieving more sustainable environmental impacts of production/distribution networks. Thus, this book presents, for the first time, a unique integrated vision of the Enterprise Supply Chain Planning and provides a comprehensive account of the state of the art models, methods and tools available to address the above mentioned features of the modern supply chain. It offers a comprehensive review of the associated literature of supply chain management and then systematically builds on this knowledge base to develop the mathematical models representing each of the core functional units and decision levels of the corporation and shows how they can be integrated into a holistic decision problem formulation. Abundant illustrations and tables help maximize reader insights into the problems discussed with several case studies and industry application also examined. This book is intended as a textbook for academics (PhD, MSc), researchers and industry decision-makers, who are involved in the design, retrofit and evaluation of alternative scenarios for the improvement of the supply chain.

Supply chain management (SCM) is growing both as a research subject and as a crucial field of importance in companies. In order to obtain sustainable supply chain success, well managed long-term relationships among the supply chain partners turn out to be indispensable. Therefore, the book is divided into two parts: Part I (supply chain relations) focuses on topics such as supply chain design and partner selection, while Part II (supply chain processes) deals with shorter term decisions in executing supply chain processes beyond firm boundaries.