Global Supply Chains

Best Practices for Managing Global Supply Chains
Over the last several decades, business has become truly global.

Though globalization has benefited many organizations via the creation of new markets, it also has presented serious new challenges for supply chain executives who often struggle to achieve desired customer service, quality, cash, cost, responsiveness, and innovation standards.

The University of Tennessee’s Global Supply Chain Institute (GSCI), in cooperation with sponsor BT Global, has developed the following white paper to capture best practices for supply chain leaders seeking to design and manage their global supply chains.

The paper begins with insights from a recent book authored by a team of faculty from the University of Tennessee and ESSEC School of Management (Paris, France) entitled Global Supply Chains: Evaluating Regions on an An EPIC Framework. The EPIC framework originally introduced in the book provides a methodology and approach that enables firms to better assess different locations for locating global supply chain operations, including sourcing, manufacturing, and distribution.

To validate the premises of EPIC, we interviewed 10 companies that we believe possess best-in-class global supply chains in order to glean best practices. These interviews also are described in this white paper.