Supply Chain Management: It's All About the Journey, Not the Destination

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jscm.12043
• Date: 01 January 2014
• Published date: 01 January 2014
• Author: Lisa M. Ellram,Martha C. Cooper

SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT: IT’S ALL ABOUT THE

JOURNEY, NOT THE DESTINATION

LISA M. ELLRAM

Miami University

MARTHA C. COOPER

The Ohio State University

With over three decades of the use of the term “supply chain management,”

five academic and practitioner perspectives of supply chain management

are described. Much ink has been devoted to defining and developing the

concept and analyzing its use or nonuse. The focus of this article is on aca-

demic effort, with suggestions of how to proceed in the future.

Keywords: supply chain management conceptualization

INTRODUCTION

At times, practice has led academic research. The

term “supply chain management” (SCM) is over

30 years old, first appearing in the practitioner litera-

ture in 1982 (Oliver & Weber, 1982). The earliest arti-

cles on supply chain management (SCM) were written

primarily by consultants, who viewed supply chain

management as a way to better manage resources and

assets. It was not until several years later that academ-

ics began to adopt the term and explore its meaning

and implementation. Even as academics began to use

the term supply chain management, they realized it

did not fully or accurately describe the complex web

or network of relationships and processes moving in

many directions and connecting companies to make

products and services more effectively available to

customers (Ellram, 1991).

This article explores the evolution of the concept

and considers the current state of supply chain man-

agement. In doing so, the literature associated with

the supply chain management concept is examined.

This literature is viewed according to the way that

SCM has been conceptualized and applied. An initial

review of the literature suggests that there are several

different streams of research regarding the way that

SCM is perceived. This lack of commonality has made

supply chain management a very broad area. How-

ever, numerous authors have noted that the breadth

of views on the notion of supply chain management

and that the inconsistency in the way that SCM is

viewed has also possibly hampered the progression of

SCM scholarly work and practitioner application, con-

fusing the way that supply chain management is

viewed in both research and practice.

This paper is organized as follows. First, a brief

review of the literature is provided. There are a number

of excellent literature review articles available (e.g.,

Ballou, 2007; Bechtel & Jayaram, 1997; Burgess, Singh,

& Koroglu, 2006; Chicksand, Watson, Walker, Radnor,

& Johnston, 2012; Croom, Romano, & Giannakis,

2000; Frankel, Bolumole, Eltantawy, Paulraj, &

Gundlach, 2008; Gibson, Mentzer, & Cook, 2005;

Kache & Seuring, 2013; Larson & Halld

orsson, 2002;

Lummus & Vokurka, 1999; Power, 2005) that provide

significantly more depth in that regard than this paper

does. Next, selected, highly cited articles that focus on

the concept of supply chain management are classified

according to whether supply chain management is

viewed as a process, a discipline, a philosophy, a gov-

ernance structure, or a functional area, including a

discussion of the merits of each approach, bringing us

to where we are today. The paper concludes with an

assessment of the current state of supply chain

research and practice, and some suggestions on how to

proceed as researchers in designing future studies.

LITERATURE REVIEW

This section begins with a definition of a supply

chain, followed by an overview of the progression of

the literature.

Definition of Supply Chain

Today, most people agree on the basic definition of

a supply chain:

A supply chain is defined as a set of three or more

entities (organizations or individuals) directly involved

Volume 50, Number 18