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Abstract:
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The spatial scope of organisations has recently been reemphasised in the context of supply
chains and supply chain management. This scope is usually accompanied by uncertainty to
organisations, especially for the extended supply chain with geographically dispersed
operations and activities, thus posing environmental complexity in the form of risks and costs
that organisations need to contend with. The main purpose of this dissertation is to create a
deep understanding of this environmental complexity facing the extended supply chain, and
the main research objective is to develop a construct, consisting of factors and measures, that
can aid in describing its state in the context of logistics.
Overall, the dissertation assumes an international business (IB) standpoint in undertaking this
task whereby it is argued that countries and borders matter, and that differences between
country environments lead to environmental complexity in the geographically dispersed
supply chain. Country-oriented constraints may then exist at macro-economic level, or the
micro-/meso- e.g. firm, network and industry levels of the business environment. In this
dissertation, supply chain (logistics) environmental complexity is developed and
operationalised in terms of the range and heterogeneity of country-oriented macro- logistics
factors that need to be considered in extended, cross-border, or global supply chain (logistics)
operations. The remainder of this dissertation is thereafter dedicated to finding these factors,
and their respective information measures, by the application of a decision-making approach.
A decision factor is one that influences the decision on selection with regards to
environmental complexity, and an information measure is a unit of measurement that aids
decision-making by providing some information on the factor.
The findings of this dissertation are based upon multiple literature reviews, content analyses
and expert opinions, and suggest the importance of 17 such decision factors and 187 different
types of information measures, which describe the state of environmental complexity in
extended, cross-border, or global supply chain operations. The study is particularly relevant
from the perspective of strategy and design issues in global supply chain management,
international operations management and international business, and more specifically for
environmental scanning and decision-making applications such as site location and transport
mode selection. By applying the results of this dissertation decision-makers may, for
example, get a preliminary idea of the environmental complexity surrounding their extended
supply chains. |
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