The International Journal of Logistics Management

While the concept of partnerships has received much attention in the literature, the focus has primarily been on the manufacturing firm. This paper explores the similarities and differences in partnerships from the perspectives of manufacturing and non‐manufacturing firms. Findings indicate that non‐manufacturing firms have had longer relationships with their partners than manufacturing firms. In addition, non‐manufacturing firms considered a reduction of procurement and administrative costs, in addition to price and reliability, as important reasons to enter partnerships, while manufacturing firms emphasized the price, quality, and delivery of products.

Little previous research has been carried out on the issues to be considered when choosing between manufacturing at home, offshore or sourcing from an offshore third party supplier. As a consequence, few concepts or frameworks have been developed to help determine how the manufacturing and sourcing resources of a business should be configured to create or sustain a competitive advantage. The offshore production or sourcing of manufactured products is usually organized to lower costs. However, such a strategic move can constrain an organization's capability to satisfy other critical market needs. Many manufacturing companies must now adopt strategies that deliver both a time‐based and a price competitive advantage. There is therefore a need to develop strategic management frameworks for determining how the use of both international production and sourcing resources can enable the adoption of both least cost and differentiation competitive strategies. This was the objective of the study detailed in this paper.

This paper discusses the basic concepts and themes of the emerging process approach to management and organization. Case study evidence is then presented to examine how these themes could be applied to changing logistics organizations. The case company, a branded consumer products manufacturer in Finland, redesigned its logistics to improve performance in terms of production efficiency and the ability to satisfy differing customer requirements. It is concluded that the new approach has considerable strength in describing the transformation. It also opens up fruitful issues for further research on changing logistics organization.

– The purpose of this paper is to categorize transportation choice research (mode choice and carrier selection) leading to insight on themes in the literature and directions for future research, – The proposed transportation choice research categorization framework is based on a comprehensive literature review of the peer‐reviewed journal papers published over the past 20 years, supplemented with a review of practitioner articles to identify current challenges in the logistics field. The academic papers are analyzed in terms of research purpose/question, methodology, findings, and challenges addressed., – The review reveals that several important themes are under‐represented in the transportation choice literature: environmental and energy use concerns; security in the supply chain; supply chain integration; international growth; and the role of the internet and emerging information technologies. This review also found that simulation, case study, and interview methodologies are under‐represented, and that normative modeling research is only lightly represented in this research., – The contributions of this research are three‐fold: the development of a classification scheme for transportation choice research, a structured review that provides a guide to earlier research on the subject of transportation choice, and the identification of research issues for future investigation.

Business process reengineering applied to the order fulfillment process is becoming very popular. This research provides an overview of reengineering order fulfillment and presents some methodologies which may be helpful to managers. Several examples from the literature are provided as illustrations of issues involved in reengineering order fulfillment. Critical success factors are described including organizational structure, information technology architecture, and performance measurement. Three computer manufacturers are studied to identify the impetus for reengineering order fulfillment, opportunities and problems. Issues associated with benchmarking order fulfillment as an input to reengineering are also presented.

Business Process Re‐engineering (BPR) appears to have had its 15 minutes of fame and is now viewed by many managers as an unqualified failure. It is important that managers realize that every concept has some merit and that lessons can be learned even from a failure. This paper reviews the similarities that exist between BPR and Supply Chain Management (SCM). These similarities allow supply chain practitioners to obtain valuable lessons from the mistakes associated with BPR implementation. These lessons are reviewed and their application to SCM is explained.

The promise of process integration between organizations too often is unfulfilled and new approaches are needed. Distributed control is a new and exciting opportunity to build more effective process networks for a wide range of applications in logistics and product development. A solution based on distributed control around the consumers of services in process networks is proposed. In logistics, it is the physical delivery that becomes the focus for distributed control when you approach the service environment from the consumer perspective. In collaborative design and manufacturing, it is the product model that becomes the focus of control. A consumer perspective provides key guidelines that help manufacturers and service providers identify the design of process networks that most efficiently add value in different industries and for different applications.

– In the emerging disciplines of risk management and supply chain management, resilience is a relatively undefined concept. The purpose of this paper is to present an integrated perspective on resilience through an extensive review of the literature in a number of disciplines including developmental psychology and ecosystems. In addition, the paper identifies and addresses some of the current theoretical gaps in the existing research., – Supply chain resilience has been defined by a number of disciplines. An integrative literature review is conducted in an attempt to integrate existing perspectives. This review also serves as the basis for the development of a conceptual model., – The key elements of supply chain resilience and the relationships among them, the links between risks and implications for supply chain management, and the methodologies for managing these key issues are poorly understood. Implications for future research advocate testing the proposed model empirically., – Supply chain disruptions have adverse effect on both revenue and costs. Resilient supply chains incorporate event readiness, are capable of providing an efficient response, and often are capable of recovering to their original state or even better post the disruptive event., – Supply chain resilience has yet to be researched from the logistics perspective. Even in well‐developed disciplines the unified theory of resilience is still under development. This research leverages existing knowledge and advances an interdisciplinary understanding of the concept.

– This paper seeks to understand business requirements for supply chain risk management (SCRM) from a practitioner perspective., – Based on the findings from an exploratory quantitative survey and qualitative focus group discussions with supply chain managers, some issues of SCRM are derived and structured along the three conceptual levels of “philosophy”, “principles” and “processes”., – The survey showed that 44 per cent of all eight responding companies expect the vulnerability of their supply chains to increase in the next five years. However, the concept of SCRM is still in its infancy., – The paper contributes to our knowledge on SCRM by presenting the business requirements from a practitioner perspective and by deriving a structure for an integrated approach to SCRM which can guide further research.