Despite the existence of supply chains for thousands of years, they did not receive serious academic inquiry until the 1980s, after which the field grew rapidly (Burgess et al., 2006). The relative youth of this field of study can also be discerned from the numerous competing definitions for supply chain management and related constructs proposed in the literature (Lummus et al., 2001; and Mentzer et al., 2001). Some researchers are focusing on the supply chain, instead of the individual company, as the unit responsible for the development and sustainment of competitive advantage (Lassar and Kerr, 1996; and Katz et al., 2003). This phenomenon, if true, has profound implications, and necessitates an in-depth study of Supply Chain Strategy (SCS).
SCS, as an emerging research area of supply chain management, still needs to build consensus in terms of definitions, constructs, characteristics and methods of application. Further, the SCS literature contains approaches that range from strategic to tactical. The predominant focus of the research on the medium to short-term ‘tactical end’ of the continuum can be probably traced to the origin of supply chain management research as a part of production and operations management field, where the main focus is on operational or tactical levels of planning and decision making. The SCS research focuses on different streams: manufacturing/upstream (Abdel-Malek et al., 2005), marketing/downstream (Cox et al., 2007), product-based (Fisher, 1997), demand-based (Godsell et al., 2006), lean versus agile (Christopher et al., 2006), integration focused (Frohlich and Westbrook, 2001), and the strategy facilitation afforded by electronic-supply (E-supply) chains (Chen et al., 2004).
A review of SCS research is important at this juncture both from academic and practitioner’s perspectives. This is supported by Hauguel and Jackson (2001), who in a survey of 300 large European and US companies found that 68% companies indicated that making improvements to their supply chains was one of their three main priorities or an important priority, 20% of the companies listed supply chain improvements as a concern, while more than half of the respondents rated their supply chain efficiency as 3 or lower on a 5-point scale. From the academic viewpoint, it is worthwhile to ascertain the current state of research on SCS and to identify gaps in methodology and theory, if any, and this paper attempts to achieve this through a synthesis of current literature.
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