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Changes to the strategy, context or environment of a business unit may necessitate a revision of its supply chain strategy. However, rethinking a supply chain strategy is not an easy problem, and has no clear answer in the specialized literature. Some fundamental questions about supply chain strategizing -i.e., the process of doing supply chain strategy -have been largely ignored, while others have been answered with overly-simplistic typeand-match approaches of unclear validity. In this paper, we present a holistic approach to supply-chain strategizing, called Conceptual System Assessment and Reformulation (CSAR), we have developed through a series of collaborative management research projects over a decade. This paper presents the key ideas of CSAR, and explains how it can be used to capture, evaluate and reformulate the supply chain strategy of a business unit. We argue that these ideas can serve as a first step towards a theory of supply chain strategy. Finally, we demonstrate the practical merits of CSAR by presenting the case of a large world-class corporation that used the approach as a starting point for an initiative to rethink the supply chain strategy of most of its business units.Keywords: Supply chain strategy, strategizing, capture, evaluation, reformulation Acknowledgements:The authors thank our students Javier Martin, Leonardo Laranjeira, Daniel Mota and Manuel Rippel for the feedback they provided to early versions of this manuscript. AbstractChanges to the strategy, context or environment of a business unit may necessitate a revision of its supply chain strategy. However, rethinking a supply chain strategy is not an easy problem, and has no clear answer in the specialized literature. Some fundamental questions about supply chain strategizing-i.e., the process of doing supply chain strategy-have been largely ignored, while others have been answered with overlysimplistic type-and-match approaches of unclear validity. In this paper, we present a holistic approach to supply-chain strategizing, called Conceptual System Assessment and Reformulation (CSAR), we have developed through a series of collaborative management research projects over a decade. This paper presents the key ideas of CSAR, and explains how it can be used to capture, evaluate and reformulate the supply chain strategy of a business unit. We argue that these ideas can serve as a first step towards a theory of supply chain strategy. Finally, we demonstrate the practical merits of CSAR by presenting the case of a large world-class corporation that used the approach as a starting point for an initiative to rethink the supply chain strategy of most of its business units.

This paper presents an axiomatic foundation for developing firm-specific scenarios in the tradition of the Intuitive Logics School (ILS), a structured scenario creation process built on that foundation, and its application using a case study. The ILS outlines a high-level scenario-development process, but without a theoretical basis or prescriptions for executing different process steps. The lack of theoretical grounding has led to a proliferation of methods for developing scenarios, without any basis for comparing them. We fill this gap in the literature by articulating a set of axioms characterizing the nature of human knowledge about the business environment and scenarios as depictions of that environment. Using this theoretical foundation, we devise a structured process for developing scenarios. Finally, we demonstrate this process by applying it to develop four scenarios for a firm in the U.S. healthcare sector.

The nature of operations executives’ strategic cognition, as the antecedent to their choices about operations strategy, remains underexplored in the literature. This mixed‐methods study examines executives’ thinking about supply chain strategy through the lens of managerial cognition. Our qualitative study at a pharmaceutical distributor, which examined 25 executives’ outlook on the future of the turbulent U.S. healthcare sector and their suggestions for adapting the company's supply chain strategy to that future, suggests that an executive's strategic cognition can be defined by its regulatory focus—whether the executive envisions the future environment in terms of opportunities or threats—and the level of optimism in regards to the envisioned future. We propose a typology that predicts the strategic choices of operations executives based on four types of cognition: pioneering, pushing, protective, and provocative. It describes whether an executive's strategic choices target traditional or novel sources of revenue, and if they seek to influence either the firm's structure and practices or its environment. Our empirical test of the typology using quantitative data collected in a survey of senior operations executives supports the study's propositions associating three of the four types of cognition with their respective preferred strategic choices.

This study examines the use of scenario planning—a strategic planning tool used for making decisions of long‐term nature—to adapt a buyer–supplier dyad for disruptions in their supply chain resulting from abrupt changes in regulations. We posit that dyadic scenarios, that is, those created jointly by a buyer and a supplier, alter the scope of supply chain design in relation to a regulatory disruption. We offer four hypotheses distinguishing dyadic scenario creation from the traditional single‐firm scenario creation and two additional hypotheses related specifically to scenarios of regulatory disruptions. Five of the six hypotheses are supported in a behavioral study of a regulatory context. We integrate these findings to propose a Supply Chain Regulation Preparedness (SRP) framework for assessing the effects of dyadic scenario creation in six regimens of regulatory disruptions. We discuss the implications of this framework for the theory and practice of organizational learning associated with supply chain configurations in the face of emergent public policies and highlight collaborative scenario planning as an emergent strategic‐level mechanism that supply chain partners can deploy jointly to address just‐in‐case uncertainties.