Methodological approaches to supply chain design¹

1 Author names are listed in alphabetical order

Abstract

This paper reviews methodological approaches to the design (or redesign) of the supply chain (SC), including comprehensive approaches (proposals concerning the entire process of designing the SC) and those that deal with four specific aspects of the process (definition of the SC objectives, reverse SC, finance, and generation and use of scenarios) that have a decisive influence on the whole design of the SC. The comprehensive approaches include those based on typologies of products, markets and SCs and those that propose a succession of the stages to follow through the design process. The discussion shows that the use of typologies is not adequate to face SC design and that the methods proposing a succession of stages may suit, provided that they are developed and presented in a manner appropriate to their use for practitioners. The discussion leads also to suggest several research lines.

Keywords:

• supply chain design
• supply chain network
• supply chain design methodology
• design of production systems
• supply chain management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

We thank the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, which have been very helpful to improve the original version of the paper.

Notes

1 Author names are listed in alphabetical order

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by project DPI2015-67740-P (MINECO/FEDER).