Many people think supply chain research is boring and it is the ivory tower that they don’t need to climb.
This article will show you why research is relevant to you and how to study without damaging your brain!
Background
What is Supply Chain Research?
In layman’s terms, research is the way you solve problems in a systematic manner and, you know very well, problems are part of the business environment.
The reason people feel a research or scholar article is a turn-off because they don’t know which one they should read, which one they shouldn’t.
Not Everything is Equal
So let’s talk about types of researches a bit.
Simply put, the aim of “Basic Research” is to observe and understand what happens (phenomenon) while “Applied Research” tries to answer practical questions. “Action Research” is usually conducted by practitioners in workplace to solve particular issues they’re facing.
Example of Supply Chain Research
Following the same logic, we can demonstrate types of researches in supply chain management context as below:
Jay Forrester, the Professor Emeritus of Management in System Dynamics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, observed that when demand at retailing level increased drastically, supply side couldn’t catch up with demand which lead to the instability of the whole supply chain. This is the example of “Basic Research”.
(MORE: The Bullwhip Effect in Action)
Hau L. Lee, the Thoma Professor of Operations, Information and Technology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, investigated the similar phenomenon in actual retail environment and provided ways to reduce the demand uncertainty through the reduction of certain business practices and the increase information sharing between trading partners, the good example of “Applied Research”.
And when developers incorporate these concept and try to solve the problems using various technologies, supply chain visibility solutions was born, the clear example of “Action Research”.
Practitioners can be cool too!
As you can see, theories are usually built by academics. However, there are some certain types of theories that are invented by practitioners through something similar to Action Research.
As you know very well, Toyota Production System, also known as TPS or Lean was invented by Toyota when they tried to fight with Ford (action research). The result was pretty amazing that MIT needed to conduct a research program to determine how Toyota did very well (basic research). Then the body of knowledge has been extended and there are many new tools as a result of applied research.
As a matter of fact, there are so many practices invented by practitioners like us that have very strong influences over the academic world, for example, Vendor Managed Inventory, Theory of Constraints, SCOR Model, S&OP or CPFR.
Magic Query
One problem associated with reading scholar article is the lack of access to research database, this is where Google Scholar comes in.
The above screenshot shows how to perform a search query that gains quick results,
This is the only search query that I use because it’s so quick and effective.
How to read the article
Once obtaining about 10-15 fulltext articles, it’s time to actually reading them. These are the reading sequence that will save your time,
Other places to find articles
Here are 3 examples where you can find great ‘research’ articles,
Conclusion
Source: Original article posted on SupplyChainOpz
Related: The Bullwhip Effect in Action