Perspectives on supply chain quality management research

Abstract

This study focuses on reviewing the current understanding of supply chain quality management research field in order to critically provide a systematic view about the existing relevant literature, and identify shortcomings and further research directions that should be explored. The Creswell’s methodology [1] in doing literature review is followed to conduct this study. As a result, three prevailing perspectives in supply chain quality management are (a) Supply chain management & quality management perspective in which the factors affecting supply chain quality management, integration, coordination, and sharing in supply chain, etc are done. But the sufficient investigation in entire supply chain as well as industry, barriers or facilitators, the role of other functions, quality of the supply chain, upstream-oriented quality activities, and organization learning within partners in the supply chain are less concerned; (b) Supply chain management & Lean perspective, prior studies identify factors affecting on supply chain performance and firm’s competitive advantages, benefits, characteristics, principles, practices and basic techniques for Lean supply chain management, etc. They have less interests in the entire supply chain investigation, Lean service, barriers or facilitators of supply chain quality management performance; and (c) Supply chain management & Innovation perspective, recent studies investigate factors affecting supply chain innovation, barriers or facilitators, developing innovation frameworks and approaches or strategies, etc. But they reveal limitations in the integration of supply chain strategies with innovation strategies and business strategies, barriers of innovation process, and how to cope with challenges and differences of various types of innovation. Overall, most of the existing researches on three mentioned perspectives mainly investigate within the manufacturing sector in developed countries, and they gives much attention to supply chain fulfillment; few studies focus on supply chain development and lack the combination.