Supply chain management: notes on the capability and the limitations of a modern logistic paradigm

„Despite twenty years of ongoing research...there is no consensus on what SCM really is“ (Kotzab/Friis 2006, p. 70). It is not an easy exercise to review and criticize a concept which is so iridescent. In order to focus our line of thought we refer to a definition from the early nineties provided by Cooper/Elram (1993, p.1, cited by Bechtel/Jayaram 1997, p.37): „Supply Chain Management is an approach whereby the entire network from the supplier to the ultimate customer is analysed and managed in order to achieve the ‚best‘ outcome for the whole system“. Within subsequent publications the pretension was further increased by claiming a “movement away from functional department suboptimization to a holistic optimization of the entire supply chain” (Bechtel/Jayaram 1997, p. 21).