Foundation for a Responsive Supply Chain

In the following I summarize the major points of the article “Responsive supply chain: A competitive strategy in a networked economy” by Gunasekaran, Lai and Cheng (2008).

Responsive Supply Chain (RSC)

The authors define a RSC to contain both aspects of Agile Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management. They argue, that both complement each other in the objective to improve organizational competitiveness.

The concept of SCM, Agile manufacturing and RSC can be compared as follows:

Comparison of Supply Chain Concepts (Source: Gunasekaran et al. 2008)

Building Blocks

The framework consists of these major building blocks:

• Strategic Planning
  Focus on Strategic Alliances, global sourcing and Technology
• Virtual Enterprise
  The framework is especially based on the concept of the Virtual Enterprise, where companies specialize their core competencies and focus on their network of supply and demand side partner companies. To achieve this the planning processes have to be intensively IT supported.
• Knowledge and IT management
  Automation and IT play a dominant role in the development of a physically distributed or virtual enterprise. The most important elements for IT support are: strategy formulation, tactical management, operations control and systems

Framework

According to the authors “The proposed framework can be employed as a competitive strategy in a networked economy in which customized products/services are produced with virtual organizations and exchanged using e-commerce.”

Framework for a Responsive Supply Chain (Source: Gunasekaran et al. 2008)

Conclusion

I found one major drawback of this paper: The presentation is not what you should expect from an A-journal paper. Sometimes the content of the paragraphs does not match the caption (Caption: Strategic Planning, Content: the virtual enterprise), furthermore the literature review feels like a succession of short abstracts of papers, without obvious connection between each of them.