Neue Veröffentlichung: Customer-facing supply chain practices – The impact of demand and distribution management on supply chain success

In der aktuellen Ausgabe (Mai 2012) des Journal of Operations Management hat Richard Pibernik gemeinsam mit seinen Ko-Autoren Daniel Rexhausen (McKinsey & Co.) und Gernot Kaiser (TU Darmstadt) einen Artikel mit dem Titel Customer-facing supply chain practices – The impact of demand and distribution management on supply chain success veröffentlicht. Den Abstract des Artikels finden Sie am Ende dieser Mitteilung.

Das Journal of Operations Management gilt als führendes Journal im Bereich Operations Management/Research: “Journal of Operations Management is one of the 40 academic journals used by the Financial Times in compiling the prestigious Business School research ranking”; “2010 Impact factors have been released. JOM’s is 5.093, the highest of any of the operations management/operations research journals. Also, the new IF places JOM as third highest among all premier academic journals in the field of business.” (http://wpcarey.asu.edu/jom/index.cfm)

Der nun veröffentlichte Artikel ist eines der Ergebnisse eines längerfristigen Projektes, das Richard Pibernik (an der EBS Business School) gemeinsam mit McKinsey & Co. durchgeführt hat. Unter dem Titel “My Chain Delivers” (http://www.mychaindelivers.com) wurde im Rahmen einer großangelegten Studie ermittelt, welche “Practices” und Prozesse heute gutes Supply Chain Management ausmachen.

Weitere wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse aus dieser Studie werden nicht lange auf sich warten lassen: Aktuell arbeiten Richard Pibernik und Daniel Rexhausen an einem Artikel über die Erfolgsfaktoren und -wirkungen des vieldiskutierten (und zum Teil auch vielbeschworenen) Konzeptes “Sales & Operations Management”. Das Working Paper zu diesem Thema erhalten Sie hier ab Mitte des Jahres.

Abstract

Traditionally, distribution has been viewed as the key (physical) link between a company's internal supply chain activities and its customers. More recently, demand management has emerged as a new dimension at the customer interface. Although it has become increasing popular in industry, it has not yet been analyzed in depth with respect to its impact on supply chain performance. Both distribution management and demand management entail customer-facing processes and practices and that are interrelated and (may) jointly determine supply chain performance. In this paper we seek to extend the stream of research in supply chain management by systematically investigating the impact of customer-facing supply chain practices on supply chain performance. Specifically, the paper examines the relative impact of relevant practices associated with demand and distribution management. To this end, we collected data from 116 multi-national companies based in Europe and analyzed it using structural equation modeling techniques. Our results suggest that (i) high demand management performance has a substantial positive impact on the overall supply chain performance, (ii) this effect is stronger than that of distribution management performance, and (iii) there is no evidence that demand management might be an enabler for effective distribution management. Among the individual practices that constitute demand and distribution management, adherence to the demand and distribution management processes and demand segmentation emerged as the strongest performance levers. Based upon additional in-depth interviews conducted with selected companies from our sample, we shed light on some of the most important findings that emerged from our survey analysis.