Teaching Case – Apple Inc: Global Supply Chain Management
Once again this year, an SCM-related teaching case received an award at the Case Center Awards and Competitions: It is entitled Apple Inc: Global Supply Chain Management and written by P. Fraser Johnson. In this case, students are placed in the role of Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, who has to make a strategic decision about the company’s complex supply chain. “Set in early 2020, it provides a detailed description of the company’s supply chain network and capabilities. Data in the case allows students to develop an understanding of Apple’s source of competitiveness and to gain insights into the management of a large, complex global supply chain network that focused on the intersection of services, hardware and software. Students will obtain an understanding of the supply chain challenges faced by Apple, in the context of supporting its corporate strategy and growth objectives.” I am sure that this case can be integrated very well into many undergraduate and postgraduate courses. This case nicely complements the 2020 award winner Apple and Conflict Materials: Ethical Sourcing for Sustainability. See also the 2017 and 2018 SCM-related winners.
What the 2021 Nobel Prize Means to SCM Research
This year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics goes to David Card “for his empirical contributions to labour economics” and Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships”. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences writes in a comprehensive article about the scientific background of this prize (PDF): “Taken together, […] the Laureates’ contributions have played a central role in establishing the so-called design-based approach in economics. This approach – aimed at emulating a randomized experiment to answer a causal question using observational data – has transformed applied work and improved researchers’ ability to answer causal questions of great importance for economic and social policy using observational data.” Similar to what is still widespread in SCM research today, the traditional approach to causal inference in economics relied on structural equation models at least until the 1980s, but, based on the laureates’ work on the local average treatment effect, natural experiments have become increasingly popular in economics. Unfortunately, almost no corresponding research exists in our discipline, but a certain number of natural experiments were carried out in related disciplines (e.g.; Lee & Puranam, 2017; Li & Zhu, 2021; Huang et al., 2021). Perhaps this Nobel Prize can serve as an inspiration for more natural experiments also in the SCM discipline?
2021 SCM Best Paper Award Winners
Two of the leading operations & supply chain management journals have recently announced their best paper award winners. First, the Journal of Supply Chain Management’s best conceptual paper for 2020 is Fabrice Lumineau and Nuno Oliveira’s paper Reinvigorating the Study of Opportunism in Supply Chain Management. Grounded in a review of empirical studies of opportunism, the authors “provide suggestions about research designs and data sources that support an agenda that steers research to refine and develop the theory about opportunism”. JSCM’s best empirical paper for 2020 is Suurmond, Wynstra and Dul’s paper Unraveling the Dimensions of Supplier Involvement and their Effects on NPD Performance: A Meta‐Analysis. This meta-analysis is based on 11,420 observations from 51 studies and “provides strong theoretical and practical insights on the important phenomenon of supplier involvement”. Second, the Journal of Operations Management’s Jack Meredith Best Paper Award goes to Jillian A. Berry Jaeker and Anita L. Tucker, who published an article that is entitled The Value of Process Friction: The Role of Justification in Reducing Medical Costs. These authors examine “‘justification’—an otherwise non-value-added process step that introduces process friction by forcing workers to explain the rationale for requesting an optional service”. Congratulations to the authors of these great papers!
Lumineau, F., & Oliveira, N. (2020). Reinvigorating the Study of Opportunism in Supply Chain Management. Journal of Supply Chain Management, 56 (1), 73-87. https://doi.org/10.1111/jscm.12215
Suurmond, R., Wynstra, F., & Dul, J. (2020). Unraveling the Dimensions of Supplier Involvement and their Effects on NPD Performance: A Meta‐Analysis. Journal of Supply Chain Management, 56 (3), 26-46. https://doi.org/10.1111/jscm.12221
Berry Jaeker, J. A., & Tucker, A. L. (2020). The Value of Process Friction: The Role of Justification in Reducing Medical Costs. Journal of Operations Management, 66 (1-2), 12-34. https://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1024
Global Supply-Chain Effects of COVID-19 Control Measures
Among the numerous SCM articles that appeared in 2020, one was particularly popular: Global Supply-Chain Effects of COVID-19 Control Measures by Guan et al. (2020). The authors “analyse the supply-chain effects of a set of idealized lockdown scenarios, using the latest global trade modelling framework”. This model is an extension of the so-called ARIO model, which is often used in the literature to simulate how negative shocks propagate throughout the economy. The findings can be summarized as follows: “Short, sharp shock: stricter COVID-19 lockdowns imposed earlier have a smaller economic impact than moderate lockdowns that last longer, according to an analysis of global supply chains. The researchers suggest a cautious approach to easing restrictions could also prevent subsequent lockdowns.” The article is part of the 2020 Altmetric Top 100, which lists the most discussed articles across 20 disciplines. It was published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
Guan, D., Wang, D., Hallegatte, S. et al. (2020). Global Supply-Chain Effects of COVID-19 Control Measures. Nature Human Behavior, 4, 577–587. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0896-8
What the 2020 Nobel Prize Means for SCM
This year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics goes to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson “for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats”. Wilson “developed the theory for auctions of objects with a common value – a value which is uncertain beforehand but, in the end, is the same for everyone”. Examples for this include the volume of minerals in a particular area and the future value of radio frequencies. Milgrom “formulated a more general theory of auctions that not only allows common values, but also private values that vary from bidder to bidder”. He demonstrated that an auction format “will give the seller higher expected revenue when bidders learn more about each other’s estimated values during bidding”. I am sure their work will now attract even more attention in the SCM discipline, because auctions already play an important role in many supplier–buyer relationships. Let us not forget the important work on auctions that has already been conducted in our discipline, for example by Wagner & Schwab (2004), Hartley and her coauthors (2006) and Carter & Kaufmann (2007), to name just a few.
2020 SCM Best Paper Award Winners
Two of the leading operations & supply chain management journals have just announced their best paper award winners at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. The Journal of Operations Management’s Jack Meredith Best Paper Award 2020 goes to two winning papers: Wiengarten, Fan, Pagell & Lo’s (2019) paper is titled Deviations from Aspirational Target Levels and Environmental and Safety Performance: Implications for Operations Managers Acting Irresponsibly; and Bavafa & Terwiesch’s (2019) paper is titled Work after Work: The Impact of New Service Delivery Models on Work Hours. Journal of Supply Chain Management’s Annual Best Paper Award goes to Kim, Wagner & Colicchia’s (2019) paper The Impact of Supplier Sustainability Risk on Shareholder Value. Two other papers were shortlisted by JSCM: Longoni, Luzzini, Pullman & Habiague (2019): Business for Society is Society’s Business: Tension Management in a Migrant Integration Supply Chain; and Lanier, Wempe & Swink (2019): Supply Chain Power and Real Earnings Management: Stock Market Perceptions, Financial Performance Effects, and Implications for Suppliers. Congratulations to the author teams!
Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2018
Emerald has recently announced the winners of their 2018 Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence. Numerous SCM-related articles have received outstanding paper or highly commended awards, and might thus serve as excellent articles to read during summer. Several winning articles relate to external (Abdallah, Abdullah & Saleh, Fawcett et al. and Ralston, Richey & Grawe) and internal (Guo et al., Makepeace, Tatham & Wu and Roh et al.) supply chain relationships. Other articles are about risk management (Jahre, Min, Park & Ahn and Oliveira & Handfield) and resilience (Ali, Mahfouz & Arisha and Tukamuhabwa, Stevenson & Busby). Other winning articles deal with sustainability (Busse et al., Dubey, Gunasekaran & Papadopoulos and Ghani et al.), complexity (Gerschberger, Manuj & Freinberger and Sayed, Hendry & Bell), the Internet of things (Haddud et al. and Yan), disruptive innovation (Pérez, Dos Santos & Cambra-Fierro) and the human factor in SCM (Schorsch, Wallenburg & Wieland). Finally, McKinnon‘s article engages in the journal ranking debate, and our own methodological paper, Wieland et al., provides guidelines for scale purification.
Teaching Case – Everything Is Connected: A New Era of Sustainability at Li & Fung
The Case Centre has recently announced the winners of their 2018 global awards and competitions. Already last year, the winning case in the Production and Operations Management category was closely related to supply chain management (see my previous post, Zara: The World’s Largest Fashion Retailer). This is also the case for the 2018 category winner, which is titled Everything Is Connected: A New Era of Sustainability at Li & Fung. It was written by Hau L. Lee and Sheila Melvin. The case deals with the way how Li & Fung, a Hong-Kong-based trading company, reacted to the Rana Plaza disaster and other such events to ensure sustainable supply chain management. Li & Fung’s Head of Learning and Development is right when saying: “The hard part is to make sustainability part of our DNA, to get 27,000 people to understand that this is now as fundamental to us as the fact that we source globally.” Therefore, this case could be a great building block for future SCM courses!
2017 CSCMP Academic Research Symposium
I spent the last couple of days in Atlanta, where the 2017 CSCMP Academic Research Symposium (ARS) took place. I truly enjoyed all the interesting discussions. Among the highlights of the conference were the best paper presentations. This year’s Bernard J. LaLonde Best Paper Award (best paper published in the Journal of Business Logistics) goes to Murfield and her co-authors, Supplier Role Conflict: An Investigation of Its Relational Implications and Impact on Supplier Accommodation. The two runner-ups are Fawcett et al., Sweating the Assets: Asset Leanness and Financial Performance in the Motor Carrier Industry, and Zaremba et al., Strategic and Operational Determinants of Relationship Outcomes With New Venture Suppliers. These articles are certainly good candidates for your reading lists. In Atlanta we also announced the CfP for the 2018 CSCMP European Research Seminar (ERS), which is ARS’s European counterpart. It will be held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands next year. As the new ERS Co-Chair I welcome your submissions.
2015 Harold E. Fearon Best Paper Award Winners
The Journal of Supply Chain Management has recently announced the winner of the 2015 Harold E. Fearon Best Paper Award, which is the award for the best paper published in that journal. The award goes to an article by Kim & Choi: Deep, Sticky, Transient, and Gracious: An Expanded Buyer–Supplier Relationship Typology. Herein, the authors propose an expanded typology of buyer–supplier relationships, which they theorize in two orthogonal aspects: “(1) relational posture, that is, how two firms regard each other (as cooperative partners or as adversaries) and (2) relational intensity, that is, how much two firms’ operations are interlinked (closely tied or arms-length)”. And these are the two finalists for the 2015 Harold E. Fearon Best Paper Award: Examining Absorptive Capacity in Supply Chains: Linking Responsive Strategy and Firm Performance by Dobrzykowski, Leuschner, Hong & Roh, and When Buyer-Driven Knowledge Transfer Activities Really Work: A Motivation–Opportunity–Ability Perspective by Kim, Hur & Schoenherr. Hopefully, you will enjoy reading these insightful articles as much as I did.
Kim, Y., & Choi, T. (2015). Deep, Sticky, Transient, and Gracious: An Expanded Buyer-Supplier Relationship Typology. Journal of Supply Chain Management, 51 (3), 61-86 DOI: 10.1111/jscm.12081
Dobrzykowski, D., Leuschner, R., Hong, P., & Roh, J. (2015). Examining Absorptive Capacity in Supply Chains: Linking Responsive Strategy and Firm Performance. Journal of Supply Chain Management, 51 (4), 3-28 DOI: 10.1111/jscm.12085
Kim, H., Hur, D., & Schoenherr, T. (2015). When Buyer-Driven Knowledge Transfer Activities Really Work: A Motivation-Opportunity-Ability Perspective. Journal of Supply Chain Management, 51 (3), 33-60 DOI: 10.1111/jscm.12077
