تعریف ساختارهای زنجیره ارزش: پیوند ایجاد ارزش استراتژیک با طراحی زنجیره تامین عملیاتی

Over the past three decades scholars have developed comprehensive insights into the operational and strategic aspect of designing and managing the supply chain. Reviewing this ample body of knowledge however one cannot help but notice a persistent disunion between the “value chain” view that considers aspects of value creation and appropriation, and the operational “supply chain” view that considers strategies and tools for designing and operating efficient inter-firm networks. Commonly these views do not interact: value creation has the aim of capturing the maximum value-added in financial terms, the supply chain view aims for designing operationally efficient supply chains. In contrast to their treatise within the academic literature, from a practical point of view these two aspects are both necessary (and thus in their own right insufficient) components to a firm's supply chain strategy. In this paper we thus turn to an exploratory case study to identify what such a combined view of the value and supply chain would entail. We refer to this purposeful creation as the “value chain architecture” and propose five fundamental decisions that define the latter: (1) the nature of value provision (driven by the core competence of the firm), (2) the operational footprint decisions for manufacturing, sourcing and distribution, (3) the approach to risk management, (4) the order fulfillment strategy (and implicit in that, the type of product customization), and (5) the buffering strategy. We conclude with an exploration of the application and utility of the “value chain architecture” concept in both academia and practice.

The rapid evolution of Supply Chain Management (SCM) as a sub-discipline within Operations Management (OM) provides strong evidence that, as Martin Christopher put it, companies no longer compete but entire value chains (Christopher, 1998). A wealth of studies and reviews, too numerous to cite here, coupled with the remarkable successes of companies such as Wal-Mart, Amazon, Dell, Toyota, Zara and the like, provide an unequivocal case that a company's ability to design and manage its value chain has become a cornerstone of contemporaneous management. The management literature covers these cases well, as for example in the cases of Dell's build-to-order value chain strategy (cf. Fugate and Mentzer, 2004, Holweg and Pil, 2001 and Kapuscinki et al., 2004) or Zara's quick response manufacturing (Ferdows et al., 2004). While the overall language is well developed, and there is insurmountable evidence that value chains differ substantially in their morphology according the type of product being supplied (Lamming et al., 2000), a general classification of value chain architectures—at the firm level–is sill amiss. In fact three decades into SCM research there remains an interesting dichotomy between the “value chain” view that considers aspects of value creating, appropriation and financial aspects of the supply chain, and the operational “supply chain” view that largely considers strategies and tools for designing and operating efficient supply chains. Commonly these views do not interact. We argue that this is a fundamental gap in bridging the strategy and OM literatures where we lack conceptual understanding of the “structural” aspects of why these supply chain structures work for certain firms, but may not for others.

As we have shown in our longitudinal case of ABB, value chain architectural decisions change over time. They adapt to external or contextual changes in light with the evolving business strategy. From the case we have derived five dimensions of a value chain architecture, shown in Table 4. It needs to be recognized that a wide range of other variables could have been considered, yet we argue that these variables stand out as the most important ones to be considered. Also, there seems to not be any logical conflict between qualitative and quantitative descriptors, as neither one in isolation provides a comprehensive description of the system, and in fact both can be used in a very complimentary fashion. For example, when discussing the risks of a sourcing strategy of a firm, providing system redundancy and risk pooling measures can provide the empirical evidence that underpins the qualitative description.