What kind of Supplychainist are you?

Posted on 2009-06-09 by

Revised on: 2015-09-29

With an ever-increasing number of companies outsourcing all non-core activities and manufacturing their products in faraway countries, Supply Chain Management (SCM) has evolved into both a professional and an academic field that is growing, spreading and developing offshoots in all directions. But what is SCM really, is it just a new name for logistics or is it possible to distinguish certain perspectives? In Logistics versus Supply Chain Management: An International Survey, Paul D. Larson & Arni Halldorsson (2004) set out to investigate how the experts themselves classify their own realms.

The Four Seasons of Supply Chain Management

Well, they are not exactly four “seasons”, I just thought it would be a catchy term to use. Anyways, what the article by Larson and Halldorsson describes, is the relationship or linkage between SCM and logistics, and depending on ones point of view, four different strands are discernible: the Tradionalist, the Unionist, the Re-Labelist, and the Intersectionist.

Actually, there may be five, as I will return to below.

Traditionalist
- SCM is a part of logistics, along the lines of external or inter-organizational logistics
Re-Labelist
- SCM is logistics, but renamed, a form of “integrated” logistics
Unionist
- Logistics is a part of SCM, reducing logistics to one of many business processes or areas
Intersectionist
- SCM is a broad strategy that cuts across many if not all business areas, where logistics becomes operational decisions, SCM becomes strategic decision, and tactical decisions fall to the intersection.

Does Supply Chain Management exist?

Five years have passed since this article, and has the world changed? Is there now a consensus on the lineage between logistics and SCM? Already more than ten years ago, in 1997, LaLonde asked the same question in ‘Supply Chain Management: Myth or reality?’ and most recently, a similar question was asked in a PhD dissertation from Sweden: Supply Chain Management – does it exist? by Erik Sandberg from the University of Linköping. What Sandberg found out was that management appears to be good in management, but lack the necessary focus on supply chain activities, while logistics handles operations as best they can, but are in dire need of strategic directions from the management level, which in the end could give the company ‘a sustainable competitive advantage vis-à-vis its competitors’ . So basically, the two, management and logistics, are living side-by-side, more or less unaware of that they need to intersect. Is that the fifth variant, the ‘Desectionist‘? I thought of calling it ‘Separatist’, but I don’t think that would be politically correct.

Personally I would call myself an intersectionist. What kind of SupplyChainist are you?

Reference

Halldorsson, A., & Larson, P. (2004). Logistics versus supply chain management: an international survey International Journal of Logistics, 7 (1), 17-31 DOI: 10.1080/13675560310001619240