This issue consists of four papers that show several interesting developments in the field of Supply Chain Management (SCM). The first paper, “A Comparative Study of Green Supply Chain Management Practices in Indian, Japanese and Chinese Companies”, by Lokesh Vijayvargy and Gopal Agarwal, aims to introduce and compare the environmental issue, Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM) and its practice in large companies of India, Japan and China by examining 121 Indian organizations for their involvement in GSCM. Along with this, performance improvement in terms of GSCM for Indian companies relative to Japanese and Chinese companies is also analyzed. The paper focuses on various GSCM factors like internal environmental management, green purchasing, customer cooperation with environmental considerations, eco design and investment recovery, and company performance in terms of environmental performance, operational performance, and financial performance. The comparative analysis reveals that Indian organizations fare quite well in implementing GSCM. In segments like internal environmental management and investment recovery, Indian companies have made significant improvement. Further, Indian organizations perform consistently well even at initial stages of GSCM implementation. The analysis also reveals that GSCM efforts have resulted in significant environmental and operational performance and moderate financial performance for Indian organizations. In short, India is doing better than China, and relative to Japanese companies, Indian organizations are competing in some segments while lagging behind in others.

The second paper, “Adoption of Supply Chain Management Strategies as a Response to Bull Whip Effect: From the Perspective of Indian Retailers”, by Tapan K Panda and Prashant K Mohanty, is the end result of a survey conducted among Indian retailers on their SCM practices in counter-handling the bull whip effect. Indian retailing industry is primarily unorganized and marked by the presence of small shops around every corner of the country. Application of SCM practices in these small, unorganized retail stores will increase profitability by lowering inventory carrying cost and increase their efficiency.

The third paper, “Backend Processes and Operational Issues: A Quick Scan Audit of the Inventory Management System Followed at Tata Croma Stores”, by Anita Kumar and Seamus O’Reilly, uses in-depth case study and action research methodology to map the inventory management process from stock inwards to stock outwards, identifies the gaps in the inventory management and operations process adopted in three Delhi-based Tata Croma Stores, and offers suggestions accordingly. It is observed that in-store inventory storage and goods outwards process are the two key areas that require improvement across all sections of the stores. The focus of the senior management is more on improving front-end operations and maintaining high customer service levels. As a result, backend operations display sub-optimal efficiencies. One strong reason for non-compliance is ‘strategy deployment’ gap. This study fulfils the dual imperatives of action research. At practice level, it can help the managers to ensure the smooth flow and functioning of the inventory in the retail stores. At the same time, it provides insights into the challenges faced by the emergent organized retail in India. This is one of the early studies to conduct an audit of a consumer electronics retail company and highlight its backend inventory management and operations problems.

The last paper, “Supply Chain Practices for Complexity in Healthcare: A Service-Dominant Logic View”, by Samyadip Chakraborty and David D Dobrzykowski, in the context of hospital supply chain network, conceptualizes complexity dimensions as quality of relationship, volume and frequency of interactions in the network, number of elements, degree of differentiation among the actors in the network, and extent of interrelationships among network elements. The paper investigates the influence of hospital supply-base complexity and customer-base complexity on key supply chain practices using Prahalad and Ramaswamy’s (2004) Dialogue-Access-Risk Benefits-Transparency (DART) framework, linking it to dynamic capabilities literature from the value co-creation perspective, using the service-dominant logic lens.

-- Sunil Bhardwaj
Consulting Editor