Ever consider a supply chain as a 'community of practice'? Embracing a learning perspective to build supply chain integration

摘要

Conventional views of supply chains depict a linear process involving discrete organizational entities which are linked by necessity from the source of supply to supply a final product or service to consumers or end users (Coyle et al., 2003). This view considers the key challenge or focus of supply chains is on maintaining the efficient flow of products. An efficient flow of products relies upon information flows along the chain not becoming distorted or inter-organizational links becoming disjointed. Such perturbations can result from firms failing to see or understand the relationships and issues further upstream or downstream from their relative position and this clearly impacts supply chain integration and performance - a situation one of the authors describes as "supply chain myopia".