For a history of Supply Chain Thought. The evolution of academic studies and of business recipes

Supply chain management is often considered as paradigmatic in today's management studies. In fact, on the one side, it tackles the network level of management, facing the complexity of inter-firm coordination; on the other side, its key strategies rely on advanced, highly challenging information systems. In other words, if we want to enhance our understanding of the emerging economy of knowledge, the development of thought about the supply chain may be seen as a good case in point. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the historical development of supply chain studies, thorough a literature review. We found that it is possible to identify three generational waves in academic research: the first generation focuses on classic logistic challenges and on transaction management; the second generation focuses on inter-firm process integration and on advanced, centralized supply chain information systems such as ERPs and Business Intelligence solutions; the third and more recent generation focuses on network games and on collaborative interaction management. A fourth, emerging stream of studies seeks to integrate the previous three approaches.