Coordination in Supply Chain Management - Review and Identification of Directions for Future Research

We review developments in fundamental research on coordination in supply chain management. The review presents recent articles in the field and explicitly addresses new trends in supply chain management, namely, the consideration of multi-tier value-added processes, the coordination of multi-sourcing/customer relationships and the handling of complex bill-of-materials structures. Our contribution is the segmentation of the existing approaches, employing a general framework and leading to insights for the future direction of research. We describe the state-of-the-art and point out areas where further research is necessary. We analyze which coordination problems models address, how they structure supply chains and which roles and relationships of supply chain partners they assume. We conclude two research potentials: First, more emphasis should be laid on approaches that apply to multi-tier production and logistic networks. Second, more attention should be paid to the problem of resource coordination in networks.