Assessing the influence of the organization in the supply chain management using NK simulation

Supply chain management advocates that the whole supply chain (SC) from the material suppliers to the end customers must be managed by adopting an integrated approach. However, different forms of governance can be adopted to pursue integration, ranging from the pure market to the hierarchy. While integration has been extensively investigated in the literature by adopting an operative perspective, the organizational perspective has been less used. However, the way the SC is organized influences the SC performance. This topic is investigated by using a recent tool offered by complexity science, namely the NK simulation model. In the proposed NK model, N represents the decisions that SC firms should make and K the interdependencies among the SC decisions calling for integration. The model reproduces how the different SC forms of governance evolve and adapt to the landscape corresponding to a SC specific integration problem. A simulation analysis is carried out to identify the SC forms of governance appropriate to the SC integration problems. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.