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Related ARContent: Supply Chain Man

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Supply Chain Management: An International Journal
Special Issue on Decision-Making and Analysis within Supply Chains

Guest Editors:

Professor Angappa Gunasekaran, Charlton College of Business, University of Massachusetts – Dartmouth, USA (agunasekaran@umassd.edu)

Professor Amir M. Sharif, Brunel Business School, Brunel University, UK (amir.sharif@brunel.ac.uk)

It is now widely agreed that understanding the behavior of making management decisions, is critical to successfully leading organizations in a constantly changing, turbulent world economy. Conflicting demands, priorities, opportunities and threats present leaders and managers with a bewildering array of choices. This special issue will attempt to explore how knowledge-based decision-making and analysis can assist in navigating and providing insight into management decisions within product and service supply chain contexts. Of particular importance to this milieu is the criticality of multi-organization, multi-stakeholder relationships and supply chain network interdependencies and commitments. Indeed, this special issue will be seeking to highlight case and methodology-based combinatorial relationships which extend and develop orthodox notions of the supplier-consumer dyad, beyond traditional notions of the supply chain concept. The dynamics and interaction of components such as the number of collaborative partners, depth of the operations management lifecycle, the type of product/service offered, logistics and distribution chains, service level agreements, key performance indicators, technology deployment, business processes design and strategic and operational drivers all contribute to successfully managing the flow of items through supply chains. Placing these components of the chain in the context of a dynamically varying system with or without engineered redundancy, therefore defines the next era of supply chain and operations management excellence and best practice.

Thus, in order to address this overarching challenge, the area of “decision making and analysis” within supply chains and operations management is broad but critical, and in situations such as those highlighted above, an emphasis is placed on the ability of supply chain participants to provide as close to real-time information as possible on the progression of products/services throughout the network. The timely and effective communication of the state of a supply chain is paramount also, especially when considering individuals, organizations, stakeholders and their interdependent relationships. Examining information which might provide an indication of supply chain components at or beyond their threshold level of tolerance, in some cases by exception, is vitally important in terms of evaluating a strategic, tactical or operational course of action to take. As such this special issue attempts to motivate further research into the decision-making, analysis and management of information and knowledge within supply chain management (SCM) and operations management (OM), with regards to the aforementioned areas.

The objective of this special issue is then to generate research that proposes suitable conceptual as well as empirically-derived research on strategies, relevant methods, and technologies for the design and development of effective and efficient supply chains with the help of IT/IS (such as ERP and RFID). Monitoring and control via performance and other scorecard metrics to improve and learn from supply chain decisions, as well as knowledge management techniques to facilitate this will also be given due attention in the special issue. It is intended that successful articles which are accepted will highlight and detail the above components which can assist in enhancing organizational competitiveness within the broader decision-making process and analysis in this focal area. The articles covering the following topics are welcome for the special issue of SCMIJ on SCM (but not limited to):

• Strategic Planning for Distributed Supply and Value Chains: Methodologies, tools, and techniques for formulating or developing strategies for SCM and associated VCs across inventory, scheduling, quality, and logistics functions (via information and other technologies).
• Knowledge and Information Technology Management in Supply Chain: ERP and knowledge-based decision-support systems.
• Multi-disciplinary integration of supply chain concepts: Cross-functional and intra-organisational level-impacts of supply chain concepts, are also sought in terms of the business level impact of networked value chains.

The following specific topics are encouraged:

• Decision-making workflows and their application to applied SCM problems
• Application of systems dynamics/thinking, functional, or causal constructs to SCM decision-making
• Organizational and managerial structures and interventions for risk-managed SCM
• Partnership formation/network of partners in a supply chain
• Evaluation of decision-making scenarios in SCM
• Business models and information system architecture for effective SCM (via Internet, WWW, ERP, and RFID)
• Monitoring and Control of SCM components and related decision-making parameters
• Sector and function-specific decision-making issues (such as risk management, environmental sustainability, quality management and network resilience)

Articles should clearly deal with planning, design, implementation and operations of supply chains in conceptual and empirical case and/or survey-based modes of research enquiry. Innovative ideas addressing issues of design, implementation and evolution of supply chain management concepts are also welcome.

Submission guidelines:

Manuscripts must be submitted no later than October 1, 2008 and conform to SCMIJ requirements. The manuscripts will be reviewed according to standard SCMIJ review procedures.

All submissions should be made though Manuscript Central, following the guidelines below:

Registering on Manuscript Central

If you have not yet registered on Manuscript Central, please follow the instructions below:

• Please log on to: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/scm
• Click on ‘Create Account’
• Follow the on-screen instructions, filling in the requested details before proceeding
• Your username will be your email address and you have to input a password of at least 8 characters in length and containing two or more numbers
• Click ‘Finish’ and your account has been created

Submitting an article to SCM on Manuscript Central

• Please log on to SCM at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/scm with your username and password. This will take you through to the Welcome page
• (To consult the Author Guidelines for this journal, click on the Home Page link in the Resources column)
• Click on the Author Centre button
• Click on the submit a manuscript link which will take you through to the Manuscript Submission page
• Complete all fields and browse to upload your article to the Decision Making and Analysis within Supply Chains special issue
• When all required sections are completed, preview your .pdf proof
• Submit your manuscript

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