Actual state of knowledge in the field of Supply Chain Management

University of “Lucian Blaga“, Faculty of Engineering, 550025, Sibiu, Emil Cioran street, No. 4, Romania

^* Corresponding author: oana.dumitrascu@ulbsibiu.ro

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse the actual state of research in the field of supply chain management and to identify eventual gaps of knowledge and potential research directions in the field concerned. Concepts such as supply chain, supply chain management, procurement management, sales management, outsourcing, quality standards, key performance indicators and data visualisation are analysed and defined. Defining conceptual elements of the approached field, analysing different national and international studies, converge to identify eventual differences concerning authors’ opinion, problems, research gaps and potential research directions. It has been found that the specialty literature analyses in general subjects such as supply chain management, supplier performance, suppliers’ selection and evaluation, suppliers’ development, performance management and do not take into consideration also the supply chain management performance, so that various gaps concerning the specialty literature in the field of supply chain management performance evaluation have been identified. Causes, effects and hypothetical solutions of the identified problems have been highlighted.