Fashion Marketing: Contemporary Issues, Second edition - Pr School

Supply chain strategies, structures and relationships 29
A useful contemporary working definition of a supply chain is:
‘The supply chain encompasses all activities associated with the
flow and transformation of goods (products and services) from initial
design stage through the early raw materials stage, and on to the
end user. Additionally, associated information and cash flows form
part of supply chain activities.’
(Hines, 2004)
There are a number of different perspectives we can observe in relation to
the development of the concept of supply chain management, as we understand
it today. The first and earliest modern management approach to
managing supply chains was clearly internally focused on improving productivity.
The second wave of development was also mainly internally focused
and an extension of the first concern with productivity to improve operations.
The third wave developed in the transport and distribution literature
concerned with moving goods efficiently and this is now mainly synthesized
and reported in the logistics literature. The first three perspectives of managing
supply chains concern themselves with efficiency and search for ways
to improve efficiency. Latterly supply chains have been viewed as demand
chains and the focus has shifted from the supplier towards the customer and
what the customer requires. Within this latter view it has been recognized that
the network metaphor and nomenclature with its non-linear perspective may
be better suited than that of a chain.
Supply networks have developed, become more complex and as a consequence
so too the boundaries of organizations have become less discrete and
somewhat blurred (Barney, 1999). Some commentators have gone further to
suggest that this blurring of boundaries may mean that it is not organizations
that are in competition any more but rather supply chains (Christopher, 1996).
Hitherto functional structures have become historical straightjackets rather
than practical functional divisions and ‘functional silos’ have restricted intraorganizational
and inter-organizational developments necessary to compete
in the modern business environment (Slack et al., 2001).
Supply chains as a means of improving productivity
of the firm
The earliest concerns of management were focused on improving productivity
of the single firm. This strand of management thought was developed in
what we now recognize as ‘scientific management’ and early practices were
observed in the Ford Automobile plant in the USA (Taylor, 1911). Firms were
seen as bounded systems in the economics literature. Within these systems it
is desirable to maximize outputs from a given set of resource inputs. Hence
productivity is an important economic measure of performance. One only has
to view current government thinking to see that productivity is still an important
focus for the UK economy and by association the firms that make up the