“Supply Chain Management Or Adaptive Business Network? – Coordination Versus Collaboration”

You are not the only company capable to create value for your clients. For making valuable products, for performing high standard services, one company is no longer enough in this new informational era, in this new needs era. Better business performing means now to satisfy more complex needs quicker than ever. Could one company face this challenge alone? Is there another way? Collaboration may be the answer. Maybe the most well-known term when it comes to collaboration between companies is Supply Chain. Why Supply Chain, why Supply Chain Management (SCM)? This article presents the answers to these questions, but also presents different approaches regarding SCM: the logistics approach regarding supply chain management, the strategic approach, the new entrepreneurial approach, supply chain as a win-win game. New paradigms regarding collaboration appeared regarding business collaboration: Adaptive Business Network (ABN). Do these new concepts imply the dead of SCM? Or are them only a new wave in SCM terminology and business orientation? Our conclusion is that these new approach is a normal change in business: businesses are made by people and people don’t like to be conducted (managed). The old-fashioned SCM was based on a coordinator versus several obedients relation. It is absolutely normal to dream at freedom and to be not very efficient while you have to play after somebody else rules. ABN is in the other side of human relations and also business relations – it insists on partnering. Everybody is a part of a chain which has as its main goal customer satisfaction, has the right to make proposals, to negotiate, and to be a winner. Of course, ABN appearance does not involve SCM disappearance, but change in how some chains are managed, in how some chains function. We shall see for the future if an organization with several brains is more successful.