1. Research Opportunities in Supply Chain Management
S G Deshmukh
ABV-Indian Institute of Information Technology & Management
Gwalior
XVI Annual International Conference of
Society of Operations Management
Doctoral Consortium
IIT Delhi
21 Dec 2012

2. Well Known Conferences for Practitioners in SCM
Council of SCM Professionals Conference
POMS Conference
Gartner Supply Chain Executive Conference (17-18 Sep , 2012 at London, UK)

3. Introduction Supply Chain Management matured as a discipline
Developments in IT have made integration possible
Basic issues in SCM : Management of Material Flow, Information Flow and Money Flow
Basic principles can be applied to a variety of contexts

4. Opportunities for Research
People Oriented
Humanitarian Logistics
Unorganized Sector/SMEs
Technology Oriented
Social Networking
Information security
Service Oriented Architecture

5. Humanitarian Logistics and Disaster Management
SCM orientation - A variety of activities such as supplies of medicine and relief operations, medical team (Doctors, nurses etc.) and other service personnel such as military forces , NGOs, ,etc. are important.
Humanitarian supply chain need to address issues related to both material and services . Importance of Information flow
Customers in such supply chains include not only end-consumers – (victims and survivors of a disaster) – but also the various organisations , donors , governments , the local community, NGOs, the military, and logistics providers .
Demand for relief is mostly unpredictable, local infrastructure often is destabilized, multiple agencies involved, transport capacity is often limited, political complexities are intense, and information fragmented/ hard to interpret.
Sudden onset of a disaster also requires a flexible supply chain whose design might need to evolve from an initial emergency response to an ongoing reconstruction operation. During the emergency response, a supply chain could require an entirely new design from scratch that features rapid response capabilities and suppliers that can deliver a supplier-led solution that involves both innovation and creativity
Performance measurement system also poses several challenges to the SCM community.

6. Humanitarian Logistics & Disaster Management Research Posers
How to define “Responsiveness” for disaster supply chains?
What are the dimensions of “flexibility” in such supply chains?
What are the behavioral implications of disaster supply chains?
Are service chains different from the production chains in the context of disaster supply chains?
How to locate and dislocate facilities on a short term basis for such supply chains?
How to develop Performance Measurement System for such chains?

7. SCM for SMES Low levels or absence of organizational hierarchy;
Involvement of CEO/Chief in operational decisions rather than strategic decisions as in large scale organizations ;
“blurred” departmental walls;
Tremendous scope for implementing concepts of “Lean or agile “ manufacturing and consequently “Lean/agile” supply chains
By design, SMEs are prone to “sustainability” due to their size and much less danger to the environment
faster rate of changes in business environment which affect SMEs to a great extent than in LSEs . However, because of their size and scale, SMEs are also able to respond to these changes positively.

8. SMES : Research Posers
Is there any difference between IT applications required for SMEs as compared to LSEs?
What are the behavioral implications of performance measurement systems in SMEs?
Does the “Scale” matters for sustainability?
What are the relevant dimensions of “Sustainability” for SMEs?
What are the societal costs for sustaining the supply chains?
What are the coordination issues as far as coupling of LSE and SME are concerned?

9. SCM for Unorganized Sector
Though the sector contributes significantly, its contribution is hardly documented. There are hardly any templates to measure their contribution. Even the formal definitions productivity and quality may not be able to address this sector.
The labour is often illiterate /uneducated. They may not have any formal opportunities for training and education.
The training component is missing and personnel are not sensitized about various dimensions related to quality, productivity and customer orientation.
There is huge gap between the way organized sector operates and the way unorganized sector operates.
Often there are no “best practices” available for unorganized sector
The scale of operation at times is very small. This may call for proper coordination and collaboration and cooperation among different units.
The primary producers (people from unorganized sector) have no direct access to either markets or market information. As a result, there is a mismatch between production and market demand. Markets today are created and captured through aggressive publicity campaigns using icons. These opportunities may need to be leveraged for such sectors.

10. Context Estimation of contribution of unorganized sector in economy
Assessment of training needs of unorganized sector from SC point of view
Inter-linkages of production, distribution, quality systems and service for unorganized sector
Evolution of SC best practices for unorganized sector
Design and development of performance measurement systems for unorganized sector

11. Unorganized Sector: Research Posers
What are the linkages between the supply chains of organized sector vis-à-vis unorganized sector?
Are there any opportunities to borrow some good practices from organized sector and map them into unorganized sector?
What are the dimensions required in the performance measurement systems of such supply chains?
How to leverage huge human potential existing in our country to make these supply chains more responsive yet financially viable?
What are the learnings from the other developing countries (such as East Asian or SAARC countries)
Cuthbertson R and Piotrowicz, 2011, Performance measurement systems in Supply chains: A framework fro contextual analysis, Int J of Productivity & Performance Measurement , 60(6),

12. Social Networking & SCM : Posers
Measurement of impact of social networking in marketing- distribution link
Assessment of mass customer feedback
Linkages of service chains and production/operations in view of social networking
Modeling of interactions through formal frameworks such as graph theory

13. Apple vs Amazon ?
Miles Trevor Blog 13 Dec 2012

14. Information Security : Posers
i) Exploration of Data security issues - Information leakage & misappropriation in supply chain networks can lead to demand overriding information , thus causing distorted view of the entire chain. The product and service deliveries may not be in tune with expectation of customers. Vital Information related to design, operation or distribution may be passed on to wrong hands (may be to the competitor) causing loss of competitive edge . Quantification of such contingencies and consequently evolving a data secure architecture could provide ample scope for research.
ii) Examination of Technology related issues- Vulnerabilities in IT infrastructure may not be adequately controlled. There could be legacy issues related to migration of technology platform from one version to another or due to compatibility issues due to different technology providers. Examining such technology related issues and suggesting appropriate technology platform based on a set of comprehensive attributes could be an interesting area for researchers.
iii) Issues related to Standards- Various standards are evolving to streamline supply chain operations from security aspects. Interoperability of such standards, their impact and implementation guidelines for such standards will offer a good opportunity for exploration.

15. Operational Financial Goodwill
Information Security – multi-layered view
Operational
Financial
Goodwill
Covers business processes, support functions and the related information assets
Looks at the financial flow which relates to the operations
At the core - disruption in operations & finances influences information flow, affecting goodwill by impacting the company’s image and reputation

16. On Demand Business
An On Demand Business is an enterprise whose business processes — integrated end-to-end across the company and with key partners, suppliers and customers — can respond with speed to any customer demand, market opportunity or external threat.
Characteristics of On Demand Business
Integration : Providing the linkage between people, processes, and data
Open :Supporting a strong commitment to standards for OS, Language and Web Services/SOA
Virtualized : Providing a flexible Build-time and Runtime environment for developing and running applications across a highly distributed IT architecture
Autonomic : Self regulating … self healing … self maintaining
Technology Infrastructure
IBM has defined an On Demand Business as an enterprise whose business processes – integrated end-to-end across the company and with key partners, suppliers and customers – can respond with speed to any customer demand, market opportunity or external threat.
Achieving the goal of becoming On Demand requires a dual focus. It requires a focus on Business Design – looking at the business models and business processes themselves, and modifying them to focus on the core competencies of the business and to eliminate any inefficiencies inherent in the business model itself. Optimizing business models is an important step in becoming an On Demand business, but it’s not enough. The underlying technology infrastructure must be capable of instantiating the new business processes, and it must also be capable of quickly adapting to any future changes in business processes. Companies can start by addressing their business design, or they can start by addressing their technology infrastructure. Regardless of where they start, both areas must be addressed in order to become On Demand. Let’s look at the issues involved in both areas of focus toward becoming On Demand.
In looking at their business design, companies seeking to become On Demand Businesses must insure that their business models are aligned with their strategic objectives. In many companies today, operations are disjointed, with internal departments operating as functional “silos”, hoarding information and operating independently of one another. As a result, redundant processes can proliferate. These functional silos can also reduce the flexibility of the organization in adapting their business processes to address changing market demands. In an ideal environment, companies would be able to model their existing business processes as well as any new business processes, examine those processes to determine where bottlenecks exist, modify the processes to achieve optimum efficiency, deploy the modified processes, and monitor them to insure that they’re operating as planned.
Aligning your business models with your strategic objectives is important, but not sufficient in and of itself. Your underlying IT infrastructure must be capable of instantiating those business processes. Breaking down functional silos from a business process perspective requires an IT environment that enables people, processes, and information to be integrated in a flexible manner. Increasing efficiency requires an IT infrastructure environment that is optimized to support a high-level of business flexibility and can scale to meet increased demand with minimal impact on capital expenditures. Finally, the underlying IT infrastructure must allow companies to extend their business reach to new customers and partners, through new business models and new ways of interacting. Because existing applications often can’t be ripped out and replaced, it also requires that those applications and the information they control be accessible by the new business processes.

17. SOA: Service Oriented Architecture
An approach for building distributed systems that allows tight correlation between the business model and the IT implementation.
Characteristics:
Represents business function as a service
Shifts focus to application assembly rather than implementation details
Allows individual software assets to become building blocks that can be reused in developing composite applications representing business processes
Leverages open standards to represent software assets
SOA represents a focused approach towards implementing/developing component oriented solutions – it comes directly from the mandate of MDA/MDD – by representing discrete functions as services and promoting application assembly (versus “development from scratch”), it enables a “building block” approach which encourages the reuse of assets to solve problems as well as enabling the ability to choreograph services to create higher level coarse services. Most importantly, it is founded on open standards to promote interoperable solution design and delivery.

18. SOA Concepts What is a service? What is a service description?
A coarse grained, self-contained entity that performs a distinct business function
What is a service description?
A standards based interface definition that is independent of the underlying implementation
How do services interact?
Through loosely-coupled, intermediated connections
How are SOA solutions created and enhanced?
Using tools and middleware according to SOA principles
These concepts really form the underlying context for SOA – of all of them, service discovery is still in an evolutionary phase although many initiatives around UDDI and other service repository initiatives will provide more context in this area in the near term. Today – service description is largely WSDL-based – service interaction is over an ESB/”smart” messaging framework to enable delivery as well as routing/transform/mediation – service choreography via BPEL – and service creation via MDA/MDD and tools approaches akin to the WebSphere Studio family for application assembly, process choreography, software development management and component definition/discovery.

19. Three Key Concepts for the Foundation for On Demand
Build –Model Driven Architecture
A style of enterprise application development and integration based on using automated tools to build system independent models and transform them into efficient implementations1
Run –Service Oriented Architecture
An approach for designing and implementing distributed systems that allows a tight correlation between the business model and the IT implementation
Manage –Business Performance Management
An approach to systems management that tightly links IT concerns with business process concerns
From an IT perspective – moving to the world on On-Demand from an integration perspective comes down to three key focus areas –
MDA – To provide a solution framework that maps directly to the business processes and provide abstraction services to build platform independent implementations that can be used to implement integration solutions
SOA – To provide a runtime environment that encourages component/service design and construction across distributed environments
BPMS – To monitor both IT as well as Business metrics as part of the operational management of the distributed SOA solution foundation

20. SOA: Research Posers How to define service standards?
What is the role of technology in SOA?
How to align business strategy with SOA?
Issues related to flexibility ?

21. Tool Kit Tool/Technique/Template Type of Tool Can be used for 1
Multi-criteria decision making tool such as AHP/ANP/TOPSIS, etc.
Qualitative/Quantitative
Structuring and Priority ratings of various issues 2
Strategic Template such as SWOT/PASTE/Force Field Analysis/7-S/ SAPLAP etc.
Qualitative
Understanding of the strategic issues involved 3
Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM)
Understanding and connectivity of various issues involved 4
Balanced Score Card and its variants
Performance measurement issues 5
SCOR template
Comparisons with organized sector and understanding of the process related issues 6
Benchmarking and Competitive Analysis tools
Comparison with best practices 7
Typical statistical analysis (Correlation/regression/factor analysis/SEM)
Quantitative
Explore and analyze various relationships 8
System Dynamics Modeling
Cause-effect relationships and explore temporal relations

22. Caution Tool Centric Vs Issue Centric Analytical Vs Empirical
Case based Vs Survey Based

23. Summary
Immense potential in both People oriented as well as technology oriented SCMS
People Oriented
Humanitarian Logistics and Disaster Management
Unorganized sector
Technology Oriented
Social Networking
Information Security related
Service Oriented Architecture
Tool-kit can be used to model a variety of issues

24. Concluding remarks..
Supply chain management: an opportunity for seamless integration
Research issues involving a variety of domains
Borrowing terminology & frameworks from IT !
Research : interdisciplinary !

25. Useful web linkages www.researchgate.net
Miles Trevor Blog 13 Dec 2012

26. Thank you deshmukh.sg@gmail.com