New Directions in Supply Chain Management

Chapter 16

Supply-Chain Integration: Putting Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again¹

Geoffrey G. Parker

Tulane University

Edward G. Anderson Jr.

University of Texas

Design for Supply-Chain Integration

A KEY FEATURE OF THE economy for the past century has been that the wealth of technological knowledge is increasing at an exponential rate. This has led to the subdivision of technologists into ever-finer specialties creating management problems for large companies that are no longer capable of monitoring and rewarding their technologists effectively (Zenger 1994). This problem is often referred to as a “diseconomies of scale in R and D.” However, two recent trends in the past decade, the rise of information infrastructural capabilities and the breaking ...