Rethinking supply chain strategy as a conceptual system

Abstract

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 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.