Classification Essay of SCRM Research

Introduction

The world is changing fast and businesses are getting more global everyday. The modern enterprises increasingly are moving away from their non-core businesses and rely on other partners for success of their business. Historically, the enterprises have spent less than a third of their budgets on purchased goods and services, as they relied on internal processes. Today, many of these enterprises spend most of their budget on purchased goods and services.

No enterprise, big or small, can ignore partnerships in order to be competitive in the current global scenario. This is in large part because of the advantages enterprises have found in strategies such as globalization, outsourcing, supply-base rationalization, just-in-time deliveries, and lean inventories. In addition, many companies have consolidated operations both internally and externally to achieve economies of scale.

While globalization and extended supply chains partnerships offer many benefits in efficiency and effectiveness, they also bring in lot of challenges and risks. Such partnerships make supply chains more brittle and can increase risks of supply-chain disruption. There are many events that has occurred in the past that has created the need to identify and mitigate such risks. The succession of economic, industrial and social crises and natural disasters, global logistics organizations have become aware of the criticality of risk management. It has become essential to achieve a complete control of internal and external risks within the supply chain (SC) (Zsidisin 2007). Indeed, the volume of published frameworks in this field has largely grown exponentially during the last 30 years. Considering this rapid development (Kouvelis 2002), it has been argued that this nascent field lacks of works which emphasize the variety of research being accomplished in this area.

Several authors underlined this fact through their frameworks and highlighted the need for an updated, systematic and narrowed re-examination of published frameworks. Others researchers did also provide different typological reviews. But not all of them are particularly different: some embrace the same typologies but under different terminologies, while others focus only in some variants of SCRM concepts. They have been employed separately, creating the need for systematic and typological framework (Singhal 2011). This is needed for discovering and understanding all previous knowledge required for developing new research works (Boote 2005). In light of these considerations, the central purpose of this article is to identify the conceptual content of SCRM, through a systematic and typological approach, as this allows conclusions to be drawn on literature review. Such an objective is not only limited to the analysis of literature review itself, but also intend to provide a new taxonomy of this field, which may offer a way to define it.

To achieve this objective, this paper is organized as follow: Study Position section reflects the effort made with the conventional SCRM literature review in order to identify its main research areas and current issues; next section describes the research methodology adopted in this article; then the author presents the developed classification of different concepts, methods and approaches. This classification is used to highlight the similarities and differences in order to better define the limits of this concept and underline the different perspectives adopted. In the next section, author discusses the findings, with an emphasis on SCRM future research orientations.