Past, present and future trends of purchasing and supply management: An extensive literature review

a r t i c l e i n f o This research aims to evaluate the state of the art of Purchasing and Supply Management (PSM). This is carried out through a wide, in-depth, and structured examination of published works. More than one thousand papers (i.e., 1055) published in 20 peer-reviewed journals were collected and analyzed to provide a snapshot of PSM research, including the extent of the overall production, the background theory used, the unit of analysis, the research method, and the main topics investigated. Other literature reviews related to PSM have been conducted in the past but have focused primarily on specific topics and/or considering a narrower set of publications. Furthermore, the authors define a framework useful for analyzing the PSM literature and outline the state of the art of PSM research from a content-specific perspective, including an evaluation of the maturity of PSM research as a discipline. This study aims to assess the current state of the art and the trends of Purchasing and Supply Management (PSM) by conducting a broad and structured examination of peer-reviewed journal articles in recent years. Following Monczka, Handfield, Guinipero, and Patterson (2010), we refer to PSM as the " strategic approach to planning for and acquiring the organization's current and future needs through effectively managing the supply base. " We therefore make a distinction between PSM and the broader concept of Supply Chain Management (SCM), which is commonly referred to as " a process-oriented approach to managing product, information, and funds flows across the overall supply network, from the initial suppliers to the final end consumers " (Metz, 1998). In other words, we focus on the source side of the well-known SCOR model promoted by the Supply Chain Council (SCC, 2008), and we exclude topics dealing with planning, production, distribution, and logistics. As a matter of fact, all these processes require specific tools and techniques. As a consequence production planning, distribution, logistics and others have consolidated as stand-alone, though interconnected academic disciplines. Similarly, PSM increasingly gained its autonomy over the years both in research and practice. On the one hand academic journals explicitly address PSM issues; on the other hand, companies increasingly design specific PSM organizational roles and responsibilities. In the end, we look at PSM as a stand-alone academic discipline within the broader field of SCM. This is in line with what Larson and Halldorsson (2002) define as the …