Supply Chain Management

The four performance measures discussed in the research give insight into some of the aspects that are involved in creating performance measures in agile supply chain. Using reputation, responsiveness, facility potential, or financial measures to judge the performance of a supply chain is not a new concept by any means. However, what has to change with supply chain management is the way these established performance measures are viewed upon. Specifically, how data is collected and analyzed to investigate these measures changes because now the processes that reflect performance have also changed. In a forward supply chain, reputation may simply mean how well the supply chain satisfies demand for new products. This change in an agile supply chain where now reputation is also based on how the reverse logistics activities impact satisfying demand for new and used products. The same connection can be made with the other measures; primarily observing how the combination of forward supply chain and reverse logistics activities impact the way performance measures are analyzed.

There are plenty of avenues to expand upon the study of performance measures of closed-loop supply chains. From both a business and engineering point-of-view, much was discussed about how these four basic performance measures change when discussing closed-loop processes. This can be expanded upon by introducing ways to quantify these measures. Quantifying performance measures helps managers make comparisons between different situations based on numerical fact. This was addressed earlier in some cases; financial measures are often quantifiable because they deal with money, and facility potential can be quantifiable because output can be based on numerical data. However, reputation and responsiveness tend to be a little more difficult to quantify. Managers have to ask themselves how they put a numerical value on a measure such as reputation, where it is more of a public perception than a mathematical...