INtodayûs business, the increasing pressures for market with
shorter product life cycle, faster technology changes, and
higher quality are the examples of criteria that determine new
concept in business environment. As a result, collaboration among
business partners provides economies to the companies by
keeping them competitive in the market. Fisher (1997) and Lee
(2002) suggest that effective collaboration between units in
a supply chain has come to play a role element in competitive
advantages in terms of the innovation, flexibility, and speed, which
are currently necessary for survival in global competition. Based
on this strategy, the focus now is shifting towards effective
supply chain management (SCM). Instead of doing business with
other organizations one by one, companies need to manage an
entire network of relationship to include logistics and other
business processes from suppliers to end customers.
Although much research on SCM has consistently been
claimed, little work has been carried out in reviewing the linkage
between the real-world practices and theories. Therefore, it seems
that closing the research gaps between SCM theories and current
practices in business should have more focus. The purpose of
this study is to develop and identify research opportunities for
exploring supply chain management by using case study and
previous literature survey. More specifically, a case study was
used to explain areas of research direction. With a case study
research, the use of SCM in an actual environment can be
illustrated and then compared with the previous literature in this
field. Subsequently, this study identifies themes and gaps within
the literature base, and uses it to define future research.
This paper is organized into different parts as follows.
In the first section, we provide the theoretical background and
literature review in SCM and present various definitions of ùsupply
chain managementû. The following section includes methodology
used in this study. Then, the literature survey and results from the