Supply Chain Design: In An Outsourcing World

Supply chain management as a formal technique has been in existence since the mid- to late 1980s. It evolved in the western world from the concept of mass customization in the 1950s and 1960s, through to the use of manufacturing resource planning in the 1970s, to the concept of continuous improvement techniques, such as JIT (just-in-time) and TQM (total quality management) in the 1980s. Since its inception, supply chain management has evolved and adapted to the continually accelerating needs of what is today a truly global economy. With modern supply chains, globalization plays a significant role in their complexity. There is no agreed starting point for globalization, as it can be traced back through the centuries in different guises. Nevertheless, globalization has been rapidly increasing in the last 15 years or so. This has been facilitated greatly by vast improvements in transport, removal of trade barriers (such as the sustained expansion of the European Union and the continued implementation of multilateral trading systems, e.g. GATT/WTO) and the vast advancements of ICT (information and communications technology) (Ethier 2005, Ngowi et al. 2005, Morrissey and Filatotchev 2000).