The Supply Chain Becomes the Demand Chain

For most of its 30‐year history, the description of our discipline as “supply chain management” has tended to encourage a supply‐focused viewpoint in which production push rather than demand pull is the dominant logic. We argue the emerging case for demand chain management, in which new manufacturing techniques (such as additive manufacturing) and enhanced information flows (big data) enable our supply chains to run, concurrently, with lower inventory and fast customer response. Remodeling our supply chains into demand chains creates the possibility that waste and obsolescence can be reduced; companies in this world will not create demand unless they can supply it. Increasingly, demand chains that exhibit both lean and agile characteristics (“leagile”) will challenge the received wisdom of lean versus agile. We explore some antecedents for the development of demand chains, the implications for the relationship between marketing and supply chain management in organizations, and the consequences for academic discourse—both research and teaching—in these two fields. In particular, we argue that offerings such as Rolls‐Royce's TotalCare® challenge siloed academic perspectives, and we formulate a cross‐functional research agenda to examine a number of these boundary‐spanning practices.