Supply Chain Management: A New Frontier of Managerial Thought and Practice

Achieving and maintaining competitive advantage in an increasingly unpredictable and changeable business climate under the new rules of global competition and sustainable development became the major challenges facing the worldwide companies’ management during the last decades. Our paper aims to reveal the developments of managerial thought and emerging practices that address these challenges, essentially based on the new relational view of business and the supply chain logic. Accordingly, the paper synthesizes the results of an extensive documentary research of the international literature that allowed us observing how this logic evolved and driven to the so called Supply Chain Management revolution. Also it's point out the growing interests at the world level in this field covering the complex problems of integrating the key business processes and managing them along the supply chain, with emphasis on its current shaping as a new multidisciplinary study field.