Supply Chain Management: Literature Review and Some Issues

Supply chain Management has assumed a significant role in firm's performance and has attracted serious research attention over the last few years. A literature review reveals a considerable spurt in research in theory and practice of SCM. Combining and informing on features of Supply Management and distribution Management. This integration has resulted in the concept of extended enterprise and the supply chain is now manifest as the collaborative supply chain across intercompany borders to maximize the value across the entire supply chain. A large number of research papers have been published in various journals in last two decades. In this paper an attempt is made to review the status of literature on Supply Chain Management. A literature classification scheme is proposed. A total of 588 articles from 13 refereed academic journals are classified into articles in five methodologies i.e. Exploratory, Normative, Methodology, Literature Review and Hypothesis testing. This literature review finds that exploratory type of research is mostly preferred it is expected that with the maturity of SCM the hypothesis testing method will pick up. The articles are further categorized in fifteen categories on the basis of content analysis. Based on this review, some possible research issues are identified.