SUPPL Y CHAIN STRUCTURES
Co o rdination, Info rmation and Optimization

Edited b y
JING-SHENG SONG
Universit y of Califo rnia, Irvine
D A VID D. Y A O
Columbia Universit y

F orew ord
F or managers and studen ts of supply c hains, the last decade has b een
exhilarating and exhausting. F or sev eral decades b efore that, the eld
w as calm, orderly , p erhaps a bit dull. The structures, metho ds, and
scop e of business transactions w ere fairly stable. But no w w e are in the
midst of three distinct but related rev olutions:
in comm unication tec hnologies, highligh ted b y the explosiv e gro wth
of the in ternet;
in p olitical structures, including the fall of the iron curtain and the
rise of stable economies in Latin America;
and in the emergence of a global managerial culture, with a moreor-less common understanding of suc h basic elemen ts as nancial
p erformance, qualit y and customer service.
These c hanges ha v e already enabled v ast shifts in the micro-lev el metho ds of transactions and the macro-lev el structures of supply c hains in
man y industries, and it is a fair guess that ev en greater shifts will come
so on. Companies that understand and exploit these dev elopmen ts will
prosp er, while those that don't will suer.
In this b o ok, editors Jeannette Song and Da vid Y ao ha v e collected
a sp ectrum of approac hes to these c hallenges from some of the leading sc holars of supply c hains, from b oth the academic and commercial
w orlds. Eac h of the articles oers an in teresting and illuminating w a y
to think ab out the k ey issues in supply-c hain managemen t. Some also
oer practical tec hniques to solv e imp ortan t problems. T ogether they
pro vide an excellen t surv ey of the curren t state of the art in researc h
and practice.
P aul Zipkin
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA