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Abstract: The supply chain has become very essential to run any business nowadays. Throughout the history of business, the professionals have been trying always to find out the best practice, and as long as the business concept is evolved over time, the practice, methodologies and techniques of doing the business also have been evolved. This evolvement led to the concept of supply chain initially and then later it became essential to have strategy for supply chain. The evolvement of the markets, globalization, and new technologies became very decisive subjects for building any supply chain and developing its strategy, but there are many other events that may take place which could enforce the supply chain decision makers to change the current approach of running their business. The dynamic business environment and the possible future trends of the global markets represent a real challenge for development of appropriate supply chain strategies, like lean, agility, and leagility. Therefore, it is very important to assess how different possible strategies are suitable for the future changes of the markets? This is to enable the supply chain to be prepared with adequate strategies for different future scenarios. To achieve this aim of preparing the supply chains for the future with adequate strategies, a deep study is done to research lean, agility and leagility, explaining the similarities and differences of these concepts. These strategies are dealing with the most important factors in supply chains; the time and the cost, what is the key reason for selecting these particular strategies lies in the fact, that they are concerned with improving the effectiveness and responsiveness in the supply chain and this is extremely important for the future. We continued study of these strategies by development of three possible future scenarios for energy scarcity, new international monetary system, and wars. The reason of developing these particular scenarios is because they are concerned with the most important political and economic events which could happen and affect the supply chains in the future (EY, 2013; Cook, 2006; Sokov, 2015). These scenarios are established to anticipate the possible challenges which could face the supply chain strategies in the future and to evaluate the suitability of supply chain strategies for such future scenarios. A survey of 150 supply chain professionals, who are working currently in the field of supply chain management, is done in two phases. The first phase is focusing on recognition of the opinions of surveyed supply chain professionals towards the supply chain strategies and their utilization. Based on the theoretical knowledge of the academic literature reviewed in this research, proposed scenarios, and the feedback of professionals in the survey, it was evident that supply chains’ managers need adequate framework, which will support improvement of current and future supply chain management. Therefore, the grounded theory methodology is used to create a new conceptual framework. The core idea of the proposed framework is to improve the global sourcing practice, which consequently will enable improving the management of supply chains according to the predicted scenarios. A second phase of survey is conducted to present the proposed framework to the supply chain professionals for evaluation. The proposed framework adds value to the global sourcing process, which enhancing the supply chain collaboration and helps to support the selected supply chain strategies for consideration – i.e., lean, agility, and leagility, to work better in the future. The proposed framework represents scientific contribution to the supply chain strategies utilization in practice. The results of this contribution are obviously to fill the gap highlighted by the supply chain professionals in the survey, who highlighted the essential need for improvement to the supply chain collaboration globally, and this will be the basic c
Keywords: Keywords: supply chain strategies, lean, agility, leagility, supply chain future trends, supply chain management, grounded theory, scenario planning, supply chain collaboration, sourcing.
Published in DKUM: 04.03.2021; Views: 1489; Downloads: 157
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