Supply chain management is commonly considered as an operational issue in the academic world. However, in the real business world, the lack of overall strategic planning for supply chain activities has already become a major factor that results in unsatisfactory supply chain performance. The purpose of this paper is to analyze supply chain strategy from a systems perspective. Four basic concepts from systems science, including environment, objective, structure and function, are adopted as our key analytical elements. A set of general methods for supply chain strategy analysis is presented. Our study suggests that by applying a systematic approach, a deep understanding of the nature of supply chain system, which is the basis of strategy analysis, can be acquired.
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