پویایی های شبکه تامین به عنوان یک منبع جدید کسب و کار

Supply networks where operational control extends well over organizational boundaries have emerged in industries producing relatively complex and customized products with tight profit margins. Products like ships, automobiles and telecommunication systems incorporate complex design and engineering skills that are produced through a tier-structured, multi-level supply networks. Efficiency in these networks has stemmed from specialization and cost efficiency in individual value adding operations. This paper demonstrates how supplier networks have evolved and how the inherent dynamics of these networks generate constantly new business opportunities for fast moving companies with a clear focus on operational efficiency. We use action research methodology on cases from the shipbuilding and constructions industry to document some of the dynamic features of supply networks. This insight is then applied to the electronics manufacturing services business to explain the fundamentals of successful operations in this highly competitive business with ever narrowing margins. In this dynamic market of contract manufacturing companies with constant focus on the reduction of production lead times by incorporating value added operations either physically or logically to maintain and recreate profitable business. To succeed in doing this, issues related to industrial parks, local tacit knowledge and reverse/repair logistics must be managed in cross-organizational manner. We conclude that there is an ever-changing limit to the expansion of supplier networks through specialization and cost efficiency, and that at one point contracting and integrating parts of the supply network will create operationally outperforming business models that further boost the inherent dynamics of supply networks.

Improving productivity through the reduction of process lead times is a well-established fact in manufacturing studies. The faster the value-adding process the more efficient the manufacturing unit. These benefits stem from reduced capital bound to operations, uniformity in output, i.e. low variation and therefore outstanding quality, together with improved capability to react on market fluctuations. At the same time increased specialization has directed companies to focus on their core operations and competencies with the evident aim to be cost efficient and innovative in an ever-narrowing technical know-how and product offering. Producing value to the end-customer has become more and more a joint effort that takes place in company networks, where flexibility and fast response to demand changes are crucial for survival. The more complex the products to be produced the more collaboration with suppliers and partners is required. What will follow in this paper is based on the two fundamentals and challenges of operations management: lead time reduction and management of multi-tier supply chains. The benefits of lead time reduction have been well documented and grounded in mathematical principles forming the foundations of operations management (Hopp and Spearman, 1996; Suri, 1998). These principles explain the relationships between lot sizes, utilization and lead time. In addition, when variation in lead times is introduced to the system, the principles predict its negative impact on operational performance and output of the process. Various operations management approaches have also focused on lead time reduction. Perhaps the best known is the 1980s Just-in-Time movement with its emphasis on inventory and waste reduction in general; yet it still had a strong impact on lead time reduction and well-documented processes to reduce capital bound to operations (e.g. Hall, 1983; Schonberger, 1982; Womack et al., 1990). This was accompanied by optimized production technology, which spotted bottlenecks as the limiting resource for total output of the system (Goldratt and Cox, 1984). In the 1990s the time-based competition was winning ground (Stalk and Hout, 1990), after which arrived agile and lean manufacturing (Womack and Jones, 1996). The underlying aim of the above-mentioned approaches to improve productivity has focused in one way or another on the reduction of process lead times. The mathematical principles are clear and simple and most successful changes in manufacturing processes, be it cell production, preventive maintenance, product layout, focused factories, set-up time reduction, etc., can be traced down to their favorable impact on lead times. More and more of the end-product value is delivered through a tier-structured supplier network with multiple connections to other value networks (Williams et al., 2002). Reduction of lead times has direct implication on the overall performance of the supply chain (Lee et al., 1997). Since Forrester's (1961) nonlinear simulations on information and delivery delays in supply chains, which helped us to understand information distortion and order batching leading to ever longer lead times and inventory build up, the importance of supply chain management has been continuously increasing. Partnering with suppliers, which was already emphasized by the JiT approach, instead of keeping them at arms-length has become more popular; yet the practices vary and should depend on the concerned industry and on the products made and delivered (Bensaou, 1999). At the same time companies are increasingly focused on their core competencies and aim toward scale and low costs in their operations. Along this development the emergence of even more structured supply networks have boosted the trend toward more modular product design (Schilling, 2000; Garavelli, 2003). Supply networks have clustered around certain technologies and services, which are consumed by one or several industries. Boundaries between companies are becoming transparent and focus is on the management of strictly defined interfaces, while leaving the modules and their internal workings to be managed autonomously by the supplier (Ashkenas et al., 1995). Supply networks show emergent behavior with all characteristics of a complex adaptive system (Choi et al., 2001; Chung et al., 2004), and therefore their management is difficult, especially if information delays exist and lead times are long and variable. At the same time new networking technologies are easing this structural transformation of supplier networks (Frohlich and Westbrook, 2002). Based on the above literature and many documented accounts by the practitioners, industries should pursue toward shorter lead times in their operations, while they intrinsically are aiming at cost efficiency through higher volumes. This has lead to the emergence of supplier networks where transactions between various up- and downstream players produce higher value and more complex end products. It is exactly these emergent developments in supply networks that are studied in this article. The aim is to explore how an industry evolves into a network, and how this network then contracts and expands further in two cases, the shipbuilding and construction industries. This development is then viewed as part of the operating model of a global electronics contract manufacturer and how observing the dynamics in supply network is generating continuously new business opportunities for fast moving companies. Yet, before the case studies, the methodological issues together with the research problems are discussed. After the cases some managerial implications and lessons learned are documented. Finally, conclusions are drawn and prospects for future research are discussed.

The dynamics of supplier networks generate business opportunities for fast moving companies integrating some of the value-adding operations in the network. Companies succeeding in doing this generate themselves an operationally outperforming position, where growth can be sought even in well-established and saturated industries. Electronics manufacturing services or contract manufacturing are used to show that exploiting these network opportunities in markets with narrow margins can produce healthy business. The different cases show that evolving supplier networks are reality and a prerequisite for successful operations. The shipbuilding case shows how an industry has turned into a networked structure, while the EMS case shows that this evolution can be turned into competitive advantage. These cases give support to our first research proposition, which stated that supplier networks are mostly composed of special players, which compete on specialization, volume and speed. The more focused supplier networks, as demonstrated by the EMS case, show how at the extreme these networks are formed into closed proximity, where not only operations are closely integrated but also the IT infrastructures. The case from the construction industry shows that fast moving companies may see business possibilities through the integrating otherwise distributed operations in the value chain. These cases follow the dictum of the second research hypothesis. Supplier networks have become ever more dynamic in their evolution, and this holds not only for specialization and further dispersion of the networks but also for their occasional contraction. This leads to the third proposition, which states that the evolutionary dynamics inherent to the supplier networks continuously create business opportunities for fast moving companies. Especially electronics, where different industrial parks and product introduction centers are examples of contracting networks, opposed to the fact that some years ago the industry believed in specialization and low cost through diverse supplier networks. The market pressures in electronics and apparently in automobiles has made these industries very flexible and fast to reorganize and optimize their supply chains. Consumer goods seem to follow this trend, while basic industries are at the brink of entering an optimized supply chain management. Industrial structures seem to go through continuous evolution, which creates new possibilities for fast and agile companies. Suppliers are turning into full service sourcing units that complete ever more complex products and even engage with product design phases. The cases displayed show that specialization to certain extent and operational efficiency on the other hand pave the ground for successful networking business. As for future research, the cases presented here only plough the surface of the myriad dynamics that the supplier networks hold. Several important issues remain to be studied, like how product postponement is to be organized in different supplier networks, or how reverse logistics should be incorporated with the forwarding one. One issue that remains clear is that contract manufacturing continues strongly in manufacturing industries and players best managing and exploiting the opportunities emerging in the network are surely capable of prospering in the future also.