Defining Supply Chain Management: In the Past, Present, and Future

The article titled “Defining Supply Chain Management” published in 2001 in the Journal of Business Logistics has been cited over 4,900 times in the last 17 years. In this paper, we first provide a historical review of how the article originated and the contributions the article made to both the theory and practice of supply chain management (SCM). Next, we highlight the key market and technological changes that have emerged in SCM followed by how the theory proposed in the 2001 article can still be relevant to support SCM research and practice going forward. We also propose ways of configuring a supply chain and partnering across companies to serve customers in an optimal way. We conclude with a call for research on developing new frameworks to better describe, explain, predict, and shed light on the evolving nature of SCM.