Toward an Educational Supply Chain Operations Reference Model

Educational success is a global issue for human societies in our Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world. Access to quality education is the fourth sustainable development goal set by United Nations member countries. Unfortunately, educational systems have generally a performance deficit. To change this situation, we assume in this paper that they could benefit from some technical contributions developed initially for commercial supply chains to optimize the production flow of goods and services. To this end, we study the transposition of the well-known Supply Chain Operations Reference model (SCOR) to educational systems which manage flows of learners. Indeed, the path that a learner follows is a succession of business processes from one educational organization to another that constitute an educational chain that could be improved through the Educational Supply Chain Operations Reference (EducSCOR) model we developed in this paper. It proposes a hierarchical structure of the educational business processes and a set of associated performance indicators allowing quick and effective assessment of educational systems and their networks. A first application case to a big French educational system dedicated to apprenticeship training is proposed to highlight the potentialities of the proposal.