Strategies for Competitive Advantage and Supply Chain Management: Synergy Opportunities

Abstract

Integrating research from the strategic management and the supply chain management (SCM) literatures promises a fertile area of research that can enrich both areas. In this work, an attempt was made to answer the recent calls for incorporating perspectives from each field into the other. These calls were further encouraged by the new competitive landscape characterized by hypercompetition and network versus network competition. Thus, the field of Strategy, with its emphasis on gaining and sustaining competitive advantage, and SCM, with its emphasis on managing processes spanning organizational boundaries, stand to benefit greatly by this integration. The introduction chapter briefly describes what this research tried to achieve. In the supply chain management literature review chapter, the importance of managing supply chains in this era of network versus network competition is shown and the strategic demand network management (SDNM) concept is presented as an evolution of supply chain management and as a more suitable name reflecting the processes involved. In the third chapter, a selected list of supply chain management practices is presented and explained. The fourth, fifth and sixth chapters will endeavor to carry on three developments. These developments seek to integrate strategy and SCM research in three ways. In the first development, the dynamic capability perspective from the strategy field and the SDNM capability are integrated in order to suggest how demand network management enables dynamic capabilities. On the other hand, dynamic capabilities perspective were used to guide the SDNM practices. In the second development, alliance management capability from the strategy field was integrated with SDNM capability and SDNM practices to show how concepts from both areas can enrich the other. And finally the third development builds on the first two developments to explore how SDNM capability can facilitate strategic entrepreneurship (SE) and SE based boundary decisions.