Introduction to the special issue on teaching supply chain management

Production and Operations Management, Spring 2000 by Johnson, M Eric, Pyke, David F

Others would contend that managers have long been interested in integration, but the lack of information technology made it impossible to implement a more "systems-oriented" approach. Clearly industrial dynamics researchers dating back to the 1950s (Forester 1958, 1961) have maintained that supply chains should be viewed as an integrated system. With the recent explosion of inexpensive information technology, it seems only natural that business would become more supply chain focused. However, while technology is clearly an enabler of integration, it alone can not explain the radical organizational changes in both individual firms and whole industries. Changes both in technology and in management theory set the stage for integrated supply chain management.

While integration and information technology may have been key catalysts in the surge of interest surrounding supply chains, eBusiness is fueling even stronger excitement. eBusiness facilitates the virtual supply chain, and as companies manage these virtual networks, competition is increasingly no longer business-to-business but rather supply-chain-to-supplychain. In other words, the importance of integration is magnified.

Still many would argue that the language and metaphors are wrong. "Chains" evoke images of linear, unchanging, and powerless. "Supply" feels pushy and reeks of mass production rather than mass customization. Better names, like "demand networks" or "customer driven webs" have been proposed by many a potential book author hoping to invent a new trend. Yet, for now, the name "supply chain" seems to have stuck. And under any name, the future of supply chain management appears bright.

In this paper, we examine the curricula used by many top engineering and graduate business schools for courses in supply chain management. We first present a framework comprising 12 key components of a "typical" supply chain management course. Next we discuss how each of the components is taught and present references that are useful as student reading assignments. Using our framework, we categorize popular teaching cases and recent business news stories related to supply chain management. We also briefly discuss pedagogy and the use of games, projects, and simulations. Finally, we examine the structure of several courses at U.S. institutions.

Key Components of Supply Chain Management

Supply chain management is an enormous topic covering multiple disciplines and employing many quantitative and qualitative tools. In our survey of class syllabi we observed a wide range of topics and a great diversity in the detail with which those topics were examined. Most of the graduate level classes did not use a textbook but rather relied on case studies and on articles from managerial journals. Within the last 3 years, several textbooks for supply chain have arrived on the market providing both managerial overviews and detailed technical treatments. For examples of managerial introductions to supply chain management see Copacino (1997), and Handfield and Nichols (1998), and for logistics texts see Lambert et al. (1997) and Ballou (1998). For more technical, model-based treatments see Silver, Pyke, and Peterson (1998) and Simchi-Levi, Kaminsky, and Simchi-Levi (1998). Also, there are several casebooks that give emphasis to global management issues including Taylor (1997), Flaherty (1996), and Dormer, Ernst, Fender, and Kouvelis (1998). In this paper, we will concentrate on courses that are primarily supported by recent articles and cases.