Supply chain management: borrowing our way to a discipline

Abstract

Supply Chain Management (SCM) is emerging as an important discipline among business curricula. In the past, emerging disciplines have come into existence when there were significant shifts in paradigms that enabled noteworthy new perspectives on vexing problems, and such can be said for SCM. In particular, SCM is a systemic approach to managing within and between organisations to enhance value creation, and it represents a logical advance in our evolving understanding of business performance. If the past provides a reasonable guide for the course of the development of SCM as a discipline, we can expect that a substantial portion of advances in the study and practice of SCM will be based upon learning and borrowing from other fields and disciplines. This paper concludes with samples of topics where such borrowing may be useful and a summary of the potential for addressing issues of interest through mining the paradigms and methods of other disciplines.