Book Reviews

摘要

The main focus of Competitive supply chains is to present a value-based management perspective towards understanding the dynamics involved in designing and deploying supply chains. This perspective considers 'value-creation' and 'value-capture' as two important objectives for supply chain management. According to the author, a supply chain solution for achieving a desired level of value creation and capture is a temporary phase. As competitive forces change, so will the desired levels of value creation and capture and hence it is important to study the strategies and enablers to achieve value capture and creation. The book is only 130 pages long. This does not let it down but instead motivates one to read it, and in the end provides quite a satisfying read. This is quite a dense book in terms of good practical information that it offers. The focus is on the concept of value, hence the bulk of the book, until chapter 5 is based on the concepts of value creation and capture. Chapter 2 presents the concept of value-based management followed by value creation techniques in chapters 3 and 4 and value capture in chapter 5. Chapter 6 discusses the impact of technology on supply chain management and chapter 7 discusses issues regarding service supply chains. Operational drivers of value (a financial perspective) which impact on value creation and capture are identified. Value creation is considered from two approaches: (1) concurrent management of product, process and supply chain design and (2) materials management model, which looks at the impact of investmcnt with respect to a cost-service trade-off. The chapter on value capture focuses on initiatives to increase collaboration and trust between supply chain partners. This chapter presents practices used in the industry to promote collaboration and also presents the results of a survey conducted to identify current practices and initiatives to facilitate collaboration among supply chain partners. Perhaps this chapter could have been a bit more detailed and thought provoking.