Service-driven global supply chains

Value-added services expand manufacturing organizations' ability to compete beyond traditional measures of manufacturing competitiveness such as cost, quality, flexibility, and delivery. This concept of expanding the roles of factories to include service has received considerable attention and wide acceptance among both researchers and practitioners. For example, recent empirical studies have demonstrated that manufacturing performance, particularly delivery performance can be enhanced through expanded service roles that focus on effective information flows within the company and to external customers. Despite such benefits, the scope of analysis has been limited to individual manufacturing organizations. Given the realities of global competition, practitioners require knowledge that extends beyond individual organizations. The domain of their problems includes the complexities of interactions with multiple stakeholders along global supply chains. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to extend the concept of the service factory to global supply chains. Specifically, the approach will be to provide a conceptualization of the role of service in global supply chain management that can be used as a starting point for discussion and further research in this area. We provide several propositions and conclude with implications for both researchers and practitioners.