The global supply chain is embarking upon a new era of challenges and opportunities. Environmental protection, energy availability, and dramatic population increases are placing unprecedented pressure on the abilities of worldwide supply chains to efficiently and effectively provide goods and services. However, modern supply chains and the supply chain of the future also have unprecedented access to technology, particularly communication technology, enabling real-time connectivity to virtually anyone on earth. This paper describes the challenges and opportunities facing the supply chain of the future and describes the various effects these issues have on supply chain design, management, and integration.

We seek to set up a research agenda around the question of whether companies in emerging economies in Asia are following the same industrial development path as those in developed countries. In particular, we compare supply chain integration in these economies through examples of companies known for their supply chain expertise and explore if and how supply-chain integration is different for these companies. These examples indicate that companies in emerging economies in Asia might be focusing on the customer or the front end of the supply chain for integration efforts while those in developed economies might be focusing on the supply or the back end of the supply chain. To explain these or other differences, we provide alternative research hypothesis based on the notion of development cycle and on region-specific development, along with related research questions for further research and their different policy implications.

This paper aims to extend understanding of adoption drivers and outcomes for supply chain management enabling technologies. In order to achieve this data has been collected from two surveys within the Australian Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) sector two years apart. The focus of this study is to understand how adoption differs for large, medium and small organizations within this sector. Although use of these technologies has been previously researched in FMCG supply chains, few of these studies have focused on why organization size appears to moderate adoption, particularly for Internet based technologies. This study also aims to broaden the analysis to include smaller firms that make up the majority of players in this group, and for whom reduced costs of access and use should provide incentives to adopt. The evidence indicates that although the adoption and use of supply chain management enabling technologies is more attractive to large and medium sized organizations, these same organizations appear to be inherently more susceptible to common impediments to extended adoption. At the same time, however, small organizations do not appear to be as encumbered by outdated processes and cultural inertia yet they do not adopt these technologies readily. There is also evidence found indicating that SME’s should not be treated as a homogeneous group, and that there are significant differences recorded between small and medium sized firms traditionally defined as being SME’s.

This paper describes the design of a closed-loop supply chain network for a lead-acid battery manufacturing operation. The planning model encompasses the entire closed-loop business process including purchasing, production, and end-of-life dead product collection and recycling. The model is a multi-objective, multi-echelon mixed integer linear program, which minimizes the total cost of the operations and the total pollution emissions related to transportation, subject to structural and functional constraints. Numerical examples have been provided to present the results regarding raw material procurement, production, recycling and inventory levels, and the transportation activities between the various echelons.

Growing demand on product individualization forces manufacturing organizations to react quickly and reducing the cost at the same time. To meet individual customers’ need, competitive enterprises have to adopt both strategies of customer-driven and cost efficient product development. This can only be achieved by raising designers’ awareness of market information, which includes both customer, and competitors’ information. Sharing market situation among concurrent design teams is critical to provide customized products. This paper discusses mass customization approach using Design Structure Matrix (DSM) methodology, which is a valuable tool for producing different product variety quickly and economically. Our focus in this paper is to demonstrate how product-customization could be done efficiently by using DSM. A case example taken from Volvo Company trucks is also included with this paper in order to show how different design rules could be implemented successfully by using DSM, which may be helpful for customization process too.