Supply Chain Management, Value Chain, Logistics, Supply, Customer, Product, Services, Processes

How can we design or improve supply chains to maximise benefits and reduce risk for organisations and the whole value chain? What management solutions and processes can we apply to the supply chain to help businesses improve product and service delivery? What metrics and measurements are appropriate for monitoring specific activities, as well as the whole value chain? How can supply chains provide products and services to customers across a range of situations?

In both operational and strategic dimensions, ’supply chains’ are often synonymous with value chains, and involve designing and managing seamless, value-added processes across organisational and international boundaries to meet the real needs of the customer. This research stream focuses on identifying and understanding how domestic, national and international supply chains contribute.

Research Streams

Current and key issues for supply chains are the focus of our research.

Global Supply Chains and Globalisation

• Managing towards global optimisation: Includes managing risk and uncertainty in today’s economic, social and environmental climate; and assessing practices and performance.

• Outsourcing, off-shoring, and procurement strategies: Issues include whether to make (vertical integration) or buy (outsource); managing networks within national boundaries or international supply chains; and concentrating on operational or strategic procurement policies.
• Supply chain integration, and strategic alliances and supply chain collaboration: Issues include how closely we should interact with partners up and down the value chain; when supply chain collaboration is appropriate and how integrated this relationship should be.
• The development chain: Issues include supply chain management in the context of product design; and whether organisations should pursue growth through disruptive innovation as opposed to building this and core capabilities through adjacent activities.
• Links between supply chain practice and performance: Conducting research involving audits into the practices and performance of service and manufacturing activities; performing international benchmarking; and guiding organisational improvements using global audit tools; and moderating the effects of knowledge development on the performance of supply chain capabilities.

Sustainable Supply Chains

Studies in this area trace the entire ‘product life cycle’ and apply an end-to-end supply chain approach to environmentally sustainable business opportunities and reducing costs.

• Sustainability frameworks: This area uses sustainability frameworks to translate global concerns into a concept of sustainability useful to companies and other organisations.  Frameworks include the Triple Bottom Line, The Natural Step, Ecological Footprint, and the Sustainability Hierarchy.

• Green supply chains: Issues relating to the challenges and benefits to organisations wanting to ‘green their supply chain’. These are closely linked to corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues in business. This area of research includes examining green activities within organisations and throughout the supply chain, and the implications of policy development and adoption.

Humanitarian and International Aid Supply Chains

This area of research extends to the two related – but different – aspects of humanitarian supply chains and aid provision.

• Emergency response and disaster management: Complex issues and challenges involved in responding to disasters including short and long-term onset, localised or dispersed, natural and/or man-made events. Also explored are complexities supply chains create in response to these events, the activities and processes involved in providing products and services in disaster situations, along with measuring the ‘success’ of these ventures via financial and operational metrics.
• International aid supply chains: Issues and challenges in providing aid, support and development to long-term humanitarian situations. Part of this research involves developing new global solutions for those who are poverty-stricken, disenfranchised, and for populations in developing regions of the world.
• The recipient’s viewpoint: Providing humanitarian aid and charity, focusing on developing ‘appropriate’ metrics from the perspective of the recipient in either of these situations. Current collaboration with a number of organisations active in these areas has provided data that will help identify and develop well-being metrics.

Industry Agglomerations/Clusters and Supply Chains

Supply chains are linked to geographical locations. When organisations either horizontally or vertically associated in a supply chain are co-located, there are often interactions and activities that benefit the region, bringing greater value, stronger knowledge networks and an increasingly innovative supply network.

• Identification of supply chains in industry agglomerations: Supply chain mapping and analysis techniques can be used to identify potential industry agglomerations. These are also valuable in determining activities to be pursued and the value of sourced goods and end products entering and leaving a geographical area. This information can then be used to determine the value of activities within a region.

Research COLLABORATIONS

Academic and Business Collaborations, and Doctoral Research

The School supports a growing core of doctoral students examining leading-edge issues in supply chain management, as well as international collaborative research between academics and various organisations, and industry conferences and seminars. Examples include:

• ‘PROBE – Promoting Business Intelligence’: One of the world’s leading business assessment and best practice benchmarking tools, PROBE is used in 41 countries to promote and support the pursuit of business excellence.  The newest tool in the suite, PROBE for Sustainable Business, is based on a systems thinking approach to sustainability – not one limited to a particular environmental, social or economic perspective.
• Devising a sustainable procurement framework for universities
• Understanding how performance measures of third-party logistics service businesses are affected by logistics capabilities, market orientation and knowledge development
• Examining high-performance theories and assessing various business excellence models in different geographical areas
• Devising an integrated business framework for sustainable supply chains that follows the Triple Bottom Line principle
• Measuring the impact of continuous improvement on innovation
• Involvement in industry through membership and active participation in the National Committee of the Logistics Association of Australia (supply chain/logistics industry association)
• Belonging to various institute boards that emphasise  supply chain management, including the Decision Sciences Institute and Production and Operations Management Society[
• Organising the International Conference of Supply Chain Management  2011 SMART Research Forum, 2010 Humanitarian Supply Chains Conference, MGSM’s 2010 Industry & Practitioners Workshop: Supply Chains at the Extreme – Their emerging role supporting development aid and humanitarian relief, and the 2010 Supply Chain Forum
•  MGSM researchers also organised, hosted and sponsored the 8th Annual ANZAM (Australian New Zealand Academy of Management) Operations, Services and Supply Chain Management Symposium in 2010.

 

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