Disciplines don’t just happen, they are made

With the advent of today’s globalized and interconnected 24/7 business, and with supply chains stretched around the globe, endlessly pumping raw materials, finished goods, information and money from one end of the world to the other, supply chain management has emerged as an important discipline in business-related curricula. In the past, emerging disciplines have appeared when there were significant shifts in paradigm, enabling new perspectives to take the center stage. Such are paradigm shift is now needed in supply chain management.

Borrowing is a good thing

When I first saw the title tagline ‘Borrowing our way to a new discipline’, I thought the authors were ridiculing supply chain management for not having own thoughts, but stealing from other disciplines, and  creating a separate discipline by simply pouring old wine in new bottles. But that is not what the authors mean.  Although supply chain management may seem to lack a clear foundation in the Kuhnian sense, where for supply chain management to clearly exhibit disciplinary thinking, research should be

firmly based upon past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges  for some time as supplying the foundation for its further practice

that does mean that supply chain management is not an emerging discipline. Quite contrary, it clearly exhibits the hallmarks of an emerging discipline. But, in order to evolve further, and to root itself, supply chain management can and should embrace other fields, and not just the obviously related subjects.

Not a sum of smaller parts

Supply chain management uses a systems approach in much of its thinking, and as such, departs from the hard scientific disciplines, where the focus is no longer an analytical concentration on the parts, but a wider perspective on the whole:

A view of the supply chain from this perspective recognises that that we are not looking at a chain of entities but a web of relationships, and this view focuses not on optimising small portions of the web and assuming that the sum of optimised parts will represent the optimal whole. Instead, this perspective focuses on patterns that connect processes by which the web accomplishes the creation of value.

The creation of value seems to be a driving force in this article, but indeed, it is a driving force in supply chains.

Supply Chain Management is a verb, not a noun

So, supply chain management should be looking at expansive ways in which a greater interorganizational whole can be created and facilitated to creat enhanced customer value. This can only be done by adopting a liberal view of what comprises the new discipline:

This suggests moving away from viewing supply chain management as a ‘thing’, which serves immediately to restrict attention to those elements that have been defined into the term. Instead, we propose that supply chain management should be viewed as a verb. We can take this perspective if we view supply chain management as the orchestration of boundary-spanning intra-and interorganisational relationships withe the intention of enhancing the creation of value.

Strong and bold words.

Sources of knowledge in SCM

I think this figure needs no further explanation.

Creative approaches

Thus, what supply chain management needs, are new approaches and approaches adapted from other disciplines, and Smith and Buddress list some 25 examples of other disciplines and realms with obvious and not so obvious linkages to supply chain flows, some of which are:

• Finance - Option theory
  • What are the strategies for quantifying an mitigating supply chain risk?
• Communications – Language
  • How does languaging and categorization affect supply chain management effectiveness?
• Psychology – Change in social systems
  • How does one promote movement toward and improved supply chain management?
• Biology – Epidemiology
  • How do problems and innovation spread in supply networks?
• Physics – Chaos theory
  • What are the limits of knowledge in supply chain management?
• Physics – Fluid mechanics
  • How do changes in volume of materials affect the challenges of managing those flows?

These are only some of the more interesting sources of knowledge from other disciplines and how they might be applied to supply chain management. This list is indeed wider, more expansive, and more creative than the list presented by James Stock in Applying theories from other disciplines to logistics.

Conclusion

This paper does show a new way to pursue research in supply chain management. Instead of cataloguing best practices  and fact finding (there are an array of case studies in supply chain management research), the focus should be on learned borrowing from other disciplines. It is only this way that it is possible to present thought-provoking paradigms and methods that can be found useful in supply chain management. The limit is the imagination of the researcher.

Giordano Bruno

Speaking of imagination, and being some sort of crossbreed-researcher myself, I am again reminded of Giordano Bruno, which I mentioned in my previous post on Broader research = better research:

Giordano Bruno was a philosopher who took the current ideas of his time and extrapolated them to new and original vistas. He claimed that all matter was intimately linked to all other matter, that we live in a universe in which all things are related. Nothing could be more true of the global supply chains of our days. Giordano Bruno is unique compared to the other martyrs of his time because of the power of his forward-thinking, where others were personal-thinking or contrary-thinking.

It is indeed time for supply chain management to be forward-thinking, and take in other perspectives, and today, 4 years after Supply chain management: borrowing our way to a discipline, I can tell that many new ideas are already in the mold.

Reference

Smith, M., & Buddress, L. (2005). Supply chain management: borrowing our way to a discipline International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 1 (4) DOI: 10.1504/IJSOM.2005.007495

Links

• wcu.edu: Michael E Smith
• pdx.edu: Leland Buddress

Related

• husdal.com: Broader research = better research?
• husdal.com: What kind of supplychainist are you?

When logistics still was, well, ‘logistics’

Logistics or supply chain management as it is now called is a relatively new science, and was even newer in 1997, the year of today’s article. Then, logistics was still logistics, Cooper Lambert and Pagh had just published their seminal article ‘Supply Chain Management: More Than a New Name for Logistics?’, and most companies were only barely starting to think about global outsourcing and its implications for their own supply chain management. Even the title of the journal the article was published in, International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, suggests that logistics at that time was mostly a physical day-to-day operation, not an area were strategic decisions were made. How times have changed…

What disciplines can logistics benefit from?

In his article, Stock lists the following as disciplines that can be used within the realm of logistics:

• accounting
• business/management
• computing
• economics
• marketing
• mathematics
• philosophy
• political science
• psychology
• sociology

He then runs through these disciplines one-by-one, looking at how they have contributed to logistics in the past (if they have) and what new concepts are emerging that can be applied to logistics, or vice versa. It is a very interesting read, and for almost every discipline, Stock lists a number of possible applications:

accounting

• Relating zero-base budgeting to the development of logistics mission statements.
• Development of logistics budgets in international markets where changes can often be rapid and unpredictable.
• Development of specific logistics-related goals and objectives each year that directly tie in to budgetary expenditures for personnel, equipment, etc.

computing

• Development of control programmes for robotics used in various logistics activities.
• Generation of customer databases to be used in segmentation studies, profitability analysis.

economics

• Defining and understanding inter- and intra-firm organizational relationships.
• Developing and maintaining strategic alliances and partnerships with vendors, suppliers and logistics service providers.
• Investigation of the nature and scope of relationships with suppliers.
• Supply chain management issues such as risk sharing, capital outlays, power and conflict between channel intermediaries and the  costs and benefits of supply chain integration.

marketing

• JIT and TQM in relationships between companies,  suppliers, vendors and customers.
• Identification and classification of  types and nature of various logistics relationships.
• Application of constructs (e.g. commitment, communication, co-operation, shared values, trust) used in relationship marketing research to better understand logistics relationships.

philosophy

• Examining existing ethical rules or norms in logistics decision making.
• Development of company policies relating to employee-employee and employee-employer relations, behaviour of employees in relationships with suppliers, vendors, customers and other relevant publics of the firm.
• Examination of the corporate culture in an organization.

political science

• Examining complaining behaviour of customers and the possible actions of customers to service failures of companies.
• Investigation of company-employee relations, especially with respect to employee suggestions and/or criticisms.
• Examination of group behaviour, such as in teams or committees.

psychology

• Examination of logistics research which have grouped companies, organizations, employees, or customers into categories in order to identify the properties or characteristics of each group.
• Inclusion of both qualitative and quantitative research methods/analyses in logistics research.
• Examination of entities in various stages of development to determine degrees of variability in characteristics, inputs and outputs common to firms, departments and individuals in specific stages.

sociology

• Implementation of environmental awareness programmes in packaging design and in warehouses and/or distribution centres (e.g. reverse logistics)
• Employee acceptance of quality programmes, cost-service trade-off strategies, strategic alliances and partnerships and other corporate-wide improvement efforts
• Corporate philosophy that logistics creates customer satisfaction, sustainable competitive advantage and customer loyalty.

Looking back, I think many of these issues have been covered in the literature on supply chain and logistics since 1997, although very few actually cite Stock in their references.

Conclusion

I like mixing ideas, and my approach to logistics, or supply chain management is no exception (Being an intersectionist, as I explained yesterday, I better keep these two terms separate from each other).  This mixture of ideas is what I first tried in my 2004 philosophical essay on Transportation Reliability and Vulnerability, where I in the end concluded with feeling a certain kinship with Giordano Bruno, and perhaps it is time to refresh what I wrote back then (excerpt only):

Giordano Bruno was a philosopher who took the current ideas of his time and extrapolated them to new and original vistas. He claimed that all matter was intimately linked to all other matter, that we live in a universe in which all things are related. Nothing could be more true of the global supply chains of our days.

Giordano Bruno is unique compared to the other martyrs of his time because of the power of his forward-thinking, where others were personal-thinking or contrary-thinking. Bruno advocated the use of conceptualizing, that is to think in terms of images. He said that to think was to speculate with images. Complex scientific correlations are often better explained in pictures than in mathematical formulae. Consequently, Bruno was able to rationalize his theories, even though he used no mathematics. Rather than spinning his ideas from the yarn of algebra, the cobweb of modern science, Bruno molded pictures and manipulated visual images to interpret complex ideas.

(Read the full passage about Giordano Bruno)

Following Bruno’s lead, leaving the mathematical world of  economics and hard-fact decisions in logistics and supply chain management behind, the research that is to follow on this blog intends in every way to be rich in images, but poor in formulas.

Reference

Stock, J. (1997). Applying theories from other disciplines to logistics International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 27 (9/10), 515-539 DOI: 10.1108/09600039710188576

Links

• University of South Florida: James Stock’s homepage

Related

• husdal.com: Transportation reliability and vulnerability – a question of cost and benefit?