From Supply Chains to Total Product Systems

The evolution of supply chain management and practice has had an integral and expanding role in contemporary global economic and socio-political change over the past 25 years or so. This role is moving closer to centre stage with the emergence of business models equating to ‘total product systems’. The impacts of advanced supply chain practice include driving fundamental changes in approach to product design, the concept of ‘product’, production methods, distribution, marketing, aftermarket support and end-of-life (EOL) reprocessing. Viewed in their full context, methods of supply chain management (SCM) have major influences on societal functioning and on economic development at global, national and local levels. Even the supply chains for simple products can involve several different industries and link many companies, large and small. Those for complex products may span several technological domains and economic sectors, linking hundreds or sometimes thousands of companies. Complexity is evident, for instance, in the scale and scope of supply chain operation in capital and consumer goods sectors (such as aircraft, cars and apparel) and in services (such as hotel chains, fast-food franchises and financial services). In such cases, elements of the design, production and distribution processes associated with an end-product, together with the associated management and support services, may be carried out in large numbers of organizations in many countries in all continents. This provides the context in which ‘a very small firm in one country may be directly linked into a global production network’ (Dicken, 2004, p. 253). ‘Geographic dispersion has occurred on a massive scale’ (Ernst, 2002, p. 504). Supply chain organization has provided the channels through which much of this has occurred. Consumer and other products, together with the methods of production and marketing that underpin them, are projected from the countries of the industrial core into