Capability bundling for effective supply chain management: An integrative framework and research agenda

Abstract

Effective supply chain management (SCM) capabilities are critical to the success of organizations. Although research over the past three decades (i) firmly establishes that SCM plays a significant role in corporate strategy, (ii) either suggests and/or finds strong positive results for the impact of different types of SCM capabilities on firm performance, and (iii) indicates that intra-firm and inter-firm capabilities are central to the effectiveness of SCM, how firms come to have the SCM capabilities stays somewhat underexplored. Therefore, to understand how firms can bundle effective SCM capabilities, we (i) develop a brief overview of capabilities research, (ii) use the subprocesses of capability bundling—stabilizing (building), enriching (developing), and pioneering (creating)—as a framework for reviewing SCM research, (iii) review 236 articles from 66 journals to develop an integrative framework of capability bundling for SCM effectiveness, (iv) discuss the findings from the review for SCM capability bundling, and (v) delineate a comprehensive research agenda that provides specific insights into how firms can come to have SCM capabilities for competitive advantages in the marketplace. In doing so, we hope to initiate a silo-breaking, cross-disciplinary research program on how firms bundle capabilities for competitive advantages.