Service-driven global supply chains

Value-added services expand manufacturing organizations' ability to compete beyond traditional measures of manufacturing competitiveness such as cost, quality flexibility and delivery This concept of expanding the roles of fa ctories to include service has received considerable attention and wide acc eptance among both researchers and practitioners. For example, recent empir ical studies have demonstrated that manufacturing performance, particularly delivery performance can be enhanced through expanded service roles that f ocus on effective information flows within the company and to external cust omers. Despite such benefits, the scope of analysis has been limited to ind ividual manufacturing organizations. Given the realities of global competit ion, practitioners require Knowledge that extends beyond individual organiz ations The domain of their problems includes the complexities of interactio ns with multiple stakeholders along global supply chains. The purpose of th is paper therefore, is to extend the concept of the service factory to glob al supply chains. Specifically, the approach will be to provide a conceptua lization of the role of service in global supply chain management that can be used as a starting point for discussion and further research in this are a. We provide several propositions and conclude with implications for both researchers and practitioners.