Supply Chain Management in the Home Appliance Industry: Evaluating Alternative Strategies

The increasing dynamics and complexity of today’s supply chains resulted in the need to select from a wide variety of the developed supply chain approaches. In this paper, a business case study is conducted to answer the research question: “How can the agility best fit within the supply chain strategies?” This research contributes to the literature by developing the DESC (differentiated enlightened supply chain) framework that consolidates necessary analysis in order to discover the scope and priorities of the supply chain from multiple perspectives. It is a guideline for the enlightened differentiated supply chain management. Through this, every different supply chain is managed differently to serve for different order winning criteria that are considered from multiple perspectives. It was concluded that in such significant and rapid changes in the requirements of different products and markets, differentiation is the clue to satisfy customer requirements and firms’ competitive position. Different priorities are to be managed differently. Also, the research concluded that postponement strategies are highly recommended for firms in competitive environments with high market dynamics.