Establishment of a comprehensive framework for strategic supply chain management

Supply chain management (SCM) has recently attracted significant attention from industry and academia. Unfortunately, strategic supply chain management (SSCM) and its general framework have seldom been addressed. SSCM refers to a situation in which its members always realize the whole direction and strategy when a supply chain carries out various functional activities to achieve a competitive advantage and long-term profit-making position among supply chains in the same industry. This study discusses how to develop not only a supply chain's overall competitive strategic direction, but also the objective of the entire supply chain with those objectives of its members, thus optimizing the performance of the supply chain. Moreover, this study presents a general SSCM framework including three stages, namely strategy formulation, strategy implementation and strategy evaluation. Also discussed herein are the limitations of this study that could be addressed in future.