ABSTRACT

Effective management of a supply chain has been increasingly recognised as a key factor in differentiating product and service offerings and gaining competitive advantage for firms (Christopher 1998). However, Supply Chain Management (SCM) as a multidisciplinary concept needs to be defined and ‘placed’ in the right context before using it as an analytical tool: it is widely used in logistics and strategic management literature, i.e. at a micro-level, as a new managerial approach presumed to better cope with increased competition at global level. Even if it has traditionally been employed for the analysis of industrial and retail companies, in the shipping and port economics literature some authors make use of this concept for the analysis of the new competitive factors for ports and maritime services (Bichou and Gray 2004; De Martino and Morvillo 2005). These authors argue that ‘it is somewhat disturbing that a clear definition of SCM and a major SCM role model are lacking’ (Kuipers 2005).