ABSTRACT
Overview Global supply chains continue to evolve due to the increasingly competitive environments, technology, changing consumer preferences, and increased access to local markets across the world. Political and cultural changes aside, from an operations management perspective, this evolutionary process has been supported through enabling technologies and newly developed tools, methods, and concepts that increase supply-chain responsiveness and its flexibility to match supply and demand. In parallel, customers have been demanding higher quality and lower per unit transaction costs for their products and services. To satisfy these evolving customer requirements, delivery strategies and systems have been developed to transport highly differentiated products and services across the world. In addition, new types of organizations have come into existence and older ones have reinvented themselves in an effort to provide an increasingly greater variety of products and services to a global economy. In fact, many of these newer organizations have been formed around completely new products and services that did not exist several years ago. is evolutionary process continues to accelerate.
