International Supply Chain Case Study

Author(s):  
Thi Song Hanh Pham ◽  
Fariba Darabi ◽  
Natalie Victoria Wilmot

The chapter aims to explore how some successful global firms organize and manage their supply chain activities at a global level. Three interlink areas of international supply chains including global production, global sourcing, and global distribution within three separate case-studies; Samsung's global production, UK Airbus's global sourcing, and Tesco's global distribution are examined in the chapter. The overall results highlight the importance of a holistic approach to international supply chain management. Findings from Samsung's smart phone production network and Tesco's global distribution suggest that firms are able to be successful when they exploit specific opportunities wherever they are located in the world. Whilst Samsung have been successful with keeping in-house production, Airbus are doing well with outsourcing. The Airbus case highlights the importance of risk management in global supply chains. All three cases demonstrate examples of benefits and challenges posed by knowledge sharing with partners in the supply chain.

Author(s):  
Thi Song Hanh Pham ◽  
Fariba Darabi ◽  
Natalie Victoria Wilmot

The chapter aims to explore how some successful global firms organize and manage their supply chain activities at a global level. Three interlink areas of international supply chains including global production, global sourcing, and global distribution within three separate case-studies; Samsung's global production, UK Airbus's global sourcing, and Tesco's global distribution are examined in the chapter. The overall results highlight the importance of a holistic approach to international supply chain management. Findings from Samsung's smart phone production network and Tesco's global distribution suggest that firms are able to be successful when they exploit specific opportunities wherever they are located in the world. Whilst Samsung have been successful with keeping in-house production, Airbus are doing well with outsourcing. The Airbus case highlights the importance of risk management in global supply chains. All three cases demonstrate examples of benefits and challenges posed by knowledge sharing with partners in the supply chain.


Author(s):  
Antonina Tsvetkova ◽  
Britta Gammelgaard

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how supply chain strategies emerge and evolve in response to contextual influence.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative single-case study presents the journey of a supply chain strategy, conceptualised as the idea of transport independence in the Russian Arctic context. Data from 18 semi-structured interviews, personal observations and archival materials are interpreted through the institutional concepts of translation and editing effects.FindingsThe study reveals how supply chain strategies evolve over time and can affect institutional factors. The case study further reveals how contextual conditions make a company reconsider its core competencies as well as the role of supply chain management practices. The findings show that strategy implementation through purposeful actions can represent a powerful resistance to contextual pressures and constraints, as well as being a facilitator of change in actual supply chains and their context. During the translation of the idea of transport independence into actions, the supply chain strategy transformed itself into a form of strategic collaboration and thereby made supply chains in the Russian Arctic more integrated than before.Research limitations/implicationsMore empirical studies on strategy implementation in interaction with contextual and institutional factors are suggested. An institutional process perspective is applied in this study but the authors suggest that future research should include a human dimension by an exploration of day-to-day routines and challenges that employees face when strategising and the actions they take.Originality/valueThe study provides an understanding of how a new supply chain strategy emerges and how it changes during implementation. In this process-oriented study – merging context, process and strategy content – it is further shown that a supply chain strategy may affect the context by responding to contextual and institutional challenges.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohita Gangwar Sharma

PurposeMany commodity supply chains suffer from an unfair value distribution across the supply chain like “Coffee Paradox.” This study explores the coffee supply chain to determine how the country of origin–geographical indicator can be used as a method of fair distribution of value and provenance across the supply chain effectuated by the blockchain technology. By looking at an exemplar case study for India, this study provides insights into diverse research streams and practice.Design/methodology/approachBased on the case method, analyzing the implementation of blockchain in the coffee industry by a leading Indian software implementation of the logic, dynamics and forces for a provenance model has been devised. It further adopts a stakeholder cum institutional theory framework to understand the logical implementation of a blockchain project embedded in a territorial logic for a commodity supply chain.FindingsThis study specifically looks at coffee which is representative of a commodity supply chain. It also explores how the malaise of unfair value distribution gets addressed by bringing farmers and the consumers on a common platform facilitated by blockchain technology. This study contributes to the literature on blockchain, territory, commodity and supply chain. Using stakeholder cum institutional theory, this study helps to explore how the implementation is successful by different actors in the supply chain through collaboration.Research limitations/implicationsThis study provides a new stream of multi-disciplinary study at the interface of supply chain, technology, international trade and geography.Practical implicationsBlockchains are embedded in the supply chain, and supply chains are embedded in territories. This linkage is paramount and the ability to make these blockchain projects successful requires the deep study of the interaction of territory, technology and actors from the provenance angle. De-commodification of coffee can be actualized through blockchain.Social implicationsThe coffee paradox and skewed value distribution is also a social problem wherein the farmers do not get the right price of their produce and are exploited. This case also highlights how this social malaise can be addressed and rightful and equitable distribution of value happens across the value chain.Originality/valueThis linkage between territory, blockchain, commodity supply chain and institutions has not been discussed in the literature. Adopting the territorial design approach, this study is an attempt to stimulate inter-disciplinary conversations and thereby create a provenance framework for commodity and research questions for scholars from different disciplines and divergent disciplinary perspectives.


Author(s):  
Giulia Bruno

Especially in the food sector, fraud and counterfeiting are affecting the trust of consumers, who are more and more oriented to chose products basing on quality and traceability attributes rather than the price. Recently, the Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS) standard was introduced to provide specifications for the representation of product traceability information. The collection and analysis of such information allows supply chains to be monitored and controlled through virtualization. Several applications of EPCIS were presented in literature, even if most of them are mainly focused on enabling technologies, with less emphasis on assessing how the available information can be used for a control at a higher level. This chapter review the relevant literature available on this topic, and present an architecture allowing the traceability of information about products throughout the entire supply chain by exploiting both the EPCIS standard and a NoSQL database. An application showing the potentiality of the proposed system in a case study is also reported.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 1814 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain J. Fraser ◽  
Martin Müller ◽  
Julia Schwarzkopf

Sustainability in supply chain management (SSCM) has become established in both academia and increasingly in practice. As stakeholders continue to require focal companies (FCs) to take more responsibility for their entire supply chains (SCs), this has led to the development of multi-tier SSCM (MT-SSCM). Much extant research has focused on simple supply chains from certain industries. Recently, a comprehensive traceability for sustainability (TfS) framework has been proposed, which outlines how companies could achieve MT-SSCM through traceability. Our research builds on this and responds to calls for cases from the automotive industry by abductively analysing a multi-tier supply chain (MT-SC) transparency case study. This research analyses a raw material SC that is particularly renowned for sustainability problems—the cobalt supply chain for electric vehicles—and finds that the extant literature has oversimplified the operationalisation of transparency in MT-SSCM. We compare the supply chain maps of the MT-SC before and after an auditing and mapping project to demonstrate the transparency achieved. Our findings identify challenges to the operationalisation of SC transparency and we outline how FCs might set to increase MT-SC transparency for sustainability.


Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (22) ◽  
pp. 6153
Author(s):  
Xuezhen Guo ◽  
Juliën Voogt ◽  
Bert Annevelink ◽  
Joost Snels ◽  
Argyris Kanellopoulos

Bio-based supply chains are by nature complex to optimize. The new logistic concept of integrated biomass logistical center (IBLC) provides us the opportunity to make full use of the idle capacity for a food/feed plant to produce biobased products so that the entire chain efficiency can be improved. Although research has been conducted to analyze the IBLC concept, is yet to be an optimization model that can optimally arrange the activities in the supply chain where an IBLC stands in the middle. To fill the knowledge gap in the literature, this paper makes the first step to develop a MILP model that enables biobased supply chain optimization with the IBLC concept, which supports logistic and processing decisions in the chain. The model is applied in a case study for a feed and fodder plant in Spain where managerial insights have been derived for transferring the plant to a profitable IBLC.


Author(s):  
Francois Schutte ◽  
Wesley Niemann ◽  
Theuns Kotzé

Background: Global sourcing has impacted inventory levels, lead times and the availability of working capital, affecting the standard financial flow of a supply chain. Poorly managing the link between the financial and physical supply chains could therefore lead to unnecessarily high inventory investments or to a short supply of inventory, affecting cash flow, working capital, sales and, subsequently, a firm’s profitability.Objectives: The aim of this generic qualitative study was to explore how firms manage their financial supply chain alongside their physical supply chain.Method: Data were collected from 12 semi-structured interviews with senior managers across six small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME) importing firms in various industries.Results: The research finds that the buyer is the driver of both upstream and downstream financial supply chain management (FSCM) as SME importers in Gauteng are proactively managing their financial alongside their physical supply chains. Through the continuous evaluation of sourcing strategies, exchange rate risk management strategies and inventory investment management strategies, firms can align their physical and financial supply chains.Conclusion: This study highlights the lead time and disruption risks and costs of global sourcing and identifies FSCM tools that can be used to alleviate the financial burden associated with long lead times.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Junaid ◽  
Ye Xue ◽  
Muzzammil Wasim Syed ◽  
Ji Zu Li ◽  
Muhammad Ziaullah

Risk is inherent in all parts of life and brings consequences, but when it specifically emerges in supply chains, it is susceptible. Therefore, this study aims at identifying and assessing supply chain risks and developing criteria for managing these risks. Supply chain (SC) risks consist of complex, uncertain, and vague information, but risk assessment techniques in the literature have been unable to handle complexity, uncertainty, and vagueness. Therefore, this study presents a holistic approach to supply chain risk management. In this paper, neutrosophic (N) theory is merged with the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) to deal with complexity, uncertainty, and vagueness. Then the proposed methodology is practically implemented through a case study on the automotive industry. SC resilience, SC agility, and SC robustness were selected as criteria for managing supply chain risks and analyzed using N-AHP. Furthermore, seventeen risks were identified and assessed by using N-TOPSIS. Results suggest supply chain resilience is the most important criterion for managing supply chain risks. Moreover, supplier delivery delays, supplier quality problems, supplier communication failures, and forecasting errors are the most vulnerable risks that occur in supply chains of the automotive industry in Pakistan.


2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 613-630 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudine Antoinette Soosay ◽  
Paul Hyland

Purpose – This paper aims to conduct a systematic review of the literature on supply chain collaboration published over a 10-year period from 2005 to 2014. It explores the nature and extent of research undertaken to identify key themes emerging in the field and gaps that need to be addressed. Design/methodology/approach – The authors review a sample of 207 articles from 69 journals, after using an iterative cycle of defining appropriate search keywords, searching the literature and conducting the analysis. Findings – Key themes include the meaning of collaboration; considerations for supply chain collaboration theory; emerging areas in collaboration for sustainability, technology-enabled supply chains and humanitarian supply chains; and the need for a more holistic approach, multi-tier perspectives and research into B2C collaborations. Research limitations/implications – The paper provides discussion and scope for future research into the area which would contribute to the field tremendously. Originality/value – There have been very few reviews in the past on supply chain collaboration, and this is one of the first extensive reviews conducted to address how well the body of knowledge on supply chain collaboration corresponds with our contemporary society.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 1145-1163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Per Engelseth ◽  
Judith Molka-Danielsen ◽  
Brian E. White

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to question the applicability of recent industry-derived terms such as “Big Data” (BD) and the “Internet of things” (IoT) in a supply chain managerial context. Is this labeling useful in managing the operations found in supply chains? Design/methodology/approach BD and IoT are critically discussed in the context of a complete supply chain organization. A case study of banana supply from Costa Rica to Norway is provided to empirically ground this research. Thompson’s contingency theory, Alderson’s functionalistic end-to-end “marketing channels” model, Penrose’s view of supply purpose associated with service provision, and particularities of banana supply reveal how end-to-end supply chains are complex systems, even though the product distributed is fairly simple. Findings Results indicate that the usefulness of BD in supply chain management discourse is limited. Instead its connectivity is facilitated by what is now becoming commonly labeled as IoT, people, devices and documents that are useful when taking an end-to-end supply chain perspective. Connectivity is critical to efficient contemporary supply chain management. Originality/value BD and IoT have emerged as a part of contemporary supply chain management discourse. This study directs attention to the importance of scrutinizing emergent and actual discourse in managing supply chains, that it is not irrelevant which words are applied, e.g., in research on information-enabled supply process development. Often the old words of professional terminology may be sufficient or even better to help manage supply.


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