Developing a framework for describing and analyzing misalignments in the supply chain - Illustrated with the Swedish Cash Supply Chain

Abstract

Background:

Narayanan & Raman (2004) present what they call an approach to treat

incentive misalignments. It consists of three steps: Accept the premise,

Pinpoint the cause, and Align or redesign. The first step, accept the premise,

is simply acknowledging that there is such a thing as incentive

misalignments. The second step, pinpoint the cause, is the process of

identifying and describing what misalignment that a supply chain suffers

from. The third step, align or redesign, is the process of aligning the

misalignments in a supply chain, which can be accomplished by different

solutions. However, their approach needs further research in order to

become a practical tool for describing and analyzing misalignments in the

supply chain.



Research question:

How can misalignments in the supply chain, which relate to changes in supply

chain structures, processes, and management components, be described and

analyzed?



Purpose:

Create a framework for describing and analyzing misalignments in the supply

chain, which relate to changes in supply chain structures, processes, and

management components.



Theory:

This research is based on two streams of theory: supply chain management

and supply chain incentive alignment. As a starting point, several different

supply chain management frameworks were reviewed in order to find a

suitable approach for this research. The framework that was found most

suitable was the Lambert et al. (1998) framework, which divides supply

chain management into three elements: structures, processes, and

IV

management components. This framework was further developed in order

to fit this research.

Supply chain incentive alignment is a fairly small and new stream of

research covering incentive alignment, agency theory, and contracts and

relational governance. One of the most influential publications within this

field is Narayanan & Raman (2004), who argue that a supply chain works

well if its companies' incentives are aligned. Based on their perspective, a

framework for misalignments was developed.



Methodology:

Based on the systems approach, a single-case study with embedded design

including several embedded cases from the same supply chain was

deployed. This was done according to the abductive research approach,

which favourable when extending existing and developing new theory. In

order to describe the case study, data was collected through observations

and different types of interviews. This data was later analyzed through

pattern matching so that the purpose of the research could be reached.



Conclusions:

In conclusion, an approach to describe and analyze misalignments in the

supply chain has been developed. However, this approach need further

empirical testing in order to be fully validated. The approach consists of

three steps: 1. Identify changes in the supply chain, 2. Identify

misalignments, and 3. Identify symptoms. For every step respectively, a

specific framework was developed in order to facilitate the identification

processes.

• author: Lundin, Johan
• supervisor: Andreas Norrman; Sten Wandel; Johan Marklund
• organization: Engineering Logistics
• publishing date: 2008
• type: Thesis
• publication status: published
• subject: Transport Systems and Logistics
• keywords: Incentive alignment, Risk and reward sharing, Agency theory, Cash supply chain, Supply chain management
• pages: 268 pages
• ISBN: 978-91-976974-3-9
• language: English
• LU publication?: yes
• id: 589b42eb-656b-4b41-9630-bdd52f3e2b13 (old id 1158470)
• date added to LUP: 2016-04-04 10:02:23
• date last changed: 2018-11-21 20:56:21