Emerging trends in large-scale supply chain management

The present evolution of production systems and markets is forcing producers, distributors and vendors to integrate their operations into large-scale networks of different services for managing materials and products, information and capitals, i.e. into a 'supply chain'. 'Integration' seems to be the new paradigm in organizing business lines, and 'supply chain management' seems to be the related organization approach that can help in managing interactions among concurrent firms as well as markets. However, supply chains are really complex systems, and their management is a really complex task in which the cooperation of several intelligent agents together and their finalization to common industrial goals need methods and procedures that are still either to be developed or, at the least, to be widely validated. The actual goal for an effective supply chain management is to obtain a good integration of all intelligent agents, such as to make each local strategy as cooperative as possible. This paper will analyse the basic concepts of supply chain management, with the aim of presenting a set of design criteria that could drive a designer in organizing more efficient management systems.