Authors: BENEDIKTE BORGSTRÖM
Departing from a practice perspective of social systems, this thesis examines
customer ordered production. Building on Giddens’s theory of structuration,
the thesis analyses the principles and practice of a customer-oriented strategy in
the supply chain system. While relevant literature outlines the complexity of a
customer ordered production strategy, scholars have seldom appreciated the
challenges and opportunities of operating in an integrated supply chain.
Different supply chain actors are prone to undertake customisation in different
ways that counteract each other. Customer ordered production changes as it is
being practiced.
Usually customer-oriented strategies are in antithesis to cost-focused
strategies. Such an opposition has been revealed to be false due to contextual
complexities and dynamics. Instead, in this thesis I argue that planned supply
chain objectives and emergent supply chain actions constitute a duality that at
the same time enables and restructures strategic development. Learning how
this duality evolves might enable the alignment of degrees of customisation and
the restructuring of supply chain practices. Customer ordered production
implies in practice coordination and adaptation of actors along the supply chain
in order to achieve strategic advantages. Supply chain integration, which takes
different forms in different contexts and situations, involves various functions
and processes as well as enabling technologies with implications for alignment.
While departing from the assumption underlying the idea and studies of supply
chain management, that is to say, the capability and willingness of actors to take
advantage of supply chain integration to act more effectively and efficiently,
this thesis investigates what system integration and social integration mean in
terms of how they work and what they imply.
Empirically, the thesis builds on the case of a car manufacturing supply
chain, namely that of Volvo Cars. The case is presented in two ways: first, it is
framed as the strategic development process of a customer ordered production
and then as the performative development of a customer ordered production.
The two presentations of the case are then confronted with each other. Volvo
Cars is special in its industry because of its aligning of production system and
supply chains to customer demand and building cars in response to customer
orders. The specifics of customer ordered production at the same time facilitate
and impede the action of different actors. The recurrent practices of the supply
chain are influenced by several logics encountering each other, seen in terms of
durability and change. Conditions and consequences vary for different actors in
the supply chain, which causes dynamics and potentially conflicts and
contradictions.
iv
This thesis aims to inspire social analysis of supply chain integration by
offering a practice perspective on the way supply chains work from strategy to
practice and in between by engaging in a conversation with different streams of
research, particularly supply chain management, industrial network approach
and strategising. As customer orientation is widely accepted as a desirable aim
for organisations and customer-oriented strategies are in use in business as well
as in social and health sectors, just to mention a few, the consequences of such
strategies, which this thesis critically investigates, have far-reaching societal
implications.
Publish Year: 2010