Ten Revolutionary Supply Chain Strategies for Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Abstract

The trends of the globalization of supplies, products, and service markets, the importance of competing by the time to market and the growing uncertainty of the environment are all factors that contributed to highlight the need for companies to improve the functioning of their supply chains.Indeed, unpredictable dynamics of a SC can arise from a variety of internal and external sources, including suppliers/partners, customers and competitors (Trkman et al. 2015). Thus, to reach competitive advantage, the challenges for today’s companies are shifting from internal efficiency to supply chain efficiency (Barroso et al. 2015). Furthermore, supply chains today being complex and global, global markets and operations must normally prompt companies to revisit their corporate, business and functional strategies in addition to focusing on outsourcing, virtual enterprise and supply chain management (Ageron et al. 2011). However, recent studies (McKinsey 2011) note that many global supply chains are not equipped to cope with the world we are entering. Therefore, every company in a SC has to continually change its business model as a response to very changing macro and micro environments issues (Trkman et al. 2015). In that sense, a sum of revolutionary supply chain strategies may be proposed to guide supply chain managers to maintain durably the competitive advantage of their companies and to improve constantly the level of the corporate performance. This paper examines the role of popular supply chain management strategies in creating and maintaining competitive advantages in the current turbulent environment.