Paper info

Coordinating activities in supply chains across disjunct firm boundaries

Anna Dubois , Lars Bankvall and Tim Torvatn

The paper was published at the 25th IMP-conference in Marseille, France in 2009.

 The coordinating of activities in supply chains is a key issue in the supply chain management literature. The main objective, and a necessity to achieve efficiency, is often described as to create 'seamless flows' of goods and information. In this article, we point to some inherent difficulties in this view. Starting with a micro-perspective analysis of how activities are coordinated by the firms in a specific supply chain, the paper addresses some of the major challenges faced by a company coordinating its activities in relation to activities coordinated by other firms. The conclusion of this analysis is that coordination of activities within supply chains needs to take into account that the coordination scope and concerns differ among the firms involved, and that the division of coordination activities among the firms may influence the performance of the supply chains as well as of the individual firms since the firms influence each others' coordination concerns.