Building a strategic business framework for proactive decision-making in the supply chain industry

The supply chain has become an essential part of any industry and it already has been regarded as a separate big industry. Any company in a contemporary business arena must be involved in the supply chain industry entirely or partly. Some companies use their own resources and others outsource various functions from professional service providers. As the supply chain industry becomes mature and complex, the competition in the industry is much stronger than before. High performance in the back-end of the supply chain is not enough to guarantee the success of a company in the dynamic market. It should be integrated and coordinated with the front-end of the company's supply chain and all these plans should be considered strategic business factors as a whole. From this point of view, this paper has adopted the techniques of strategic and competitive analysis typically used for enterprise consulting and has applied them to the supply chain industry. From this study we have constructed a strategic business framework which we propose for companies to use as a basis for proactive decision making.