An effective way to assess supply management is to consider mathematical models of manufacturer-retail market life cycles.

For example, the attached article

P.M. Reyes, A mathematical example of the two-echelon inventory model with asymmetric market information, Applied Math. and Computation 162, 2005, 257-264

calls attention to increasing interest in the single-period problem (SSP) known as the newsboy problem. Reyes points out that interest in the newsboy problem may be characteristic in part because of the recent trend in supply chain management (SCM) and the decrease in product life cycles brought about by technological advances. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the cell phone market, which appears to have at most a 6 month life cycle.

Dear Professor, thank you very much to raise such important questions that helps both emerging and developing countries. I completely agree with your challenges. I am doing a research on integrating the early part of supply chain that existed in developed countries with their counterpart with firms in developed countries. For such kind of endeavors I have selected a standard reference model SCOR for optimizing the accumulated knowledge. SCOR model is generic and a quasi-standard model to the description and analysis of supply chains. The SCOR model uses three well-known individual techniques: business process modeling, benchmarking performance and best practice analysis and turned into an integrated approach. It comprises a complete set of supply chain performance metrics, industry best practices, and enabling systems. The current version (V.10) of this normative model includes more than 200 described process elements, 550 defined performance metrics and 500 leading business practices, which are hierarchically organized on levels. The SCOR model helps to identify the gaps and inefficiencies in processes. The best practices fix the inefficiencies with the leading practices and tools from different successful practices. However, such models have created and operated in developed countries scenarios; they have faced different challenges and barriers which have not faced in developed nations.

The Manufacturing industries in economically developed countries such as USA and EU are well-designed and supported by an outstanding ICT and physical infrastructure, which, in turn, enables smooth information flow and physical goods among supplier, manufacturer and customers. It is highly based on the recent advanced information and communication technologies technological. It is a difficult; resources and knowledge base one to implement such a model in the manufacturing industry in developing countries. Especially, the early processes' products come from developing countries; those industries have totally different conditions and constraints. The existing models did not meet these needs. In consequence, the early processes in the supply chain can often not be considered in a model because of that it was not applicable. The lack of such a standard industrial framework in firms of the developing country makes the modeling and improvement efforts complicated. Such a supply chain model would also be much needed when productivity improvements and global supply chain integration efforts required in the entire supply chain system. Many cross-cultural studies provide evidence that, because of cultural and operating environment differences, successful models, approaches and practices in one country need to be adapted for effective use in another country. It may even cause successful well tested strategies and models that worked in developed economies to fail. By considering the existing supply chain practices and engineer SCOR model to fit to the situations of the firms in developing countries.

Generally, the lack and limited resources, weak and lack of ICT, cultural and organizational challenges, technical and physical infrastructure, shortage of qualified and experienced professional and manual and semi-automated supply chain operations and other factors that influence the success of supply chain models for companies in developed economies are largely different from those developing countries. Figure below demonstrates such challenges.

In my opinion the best approach for such effort are adapting such types of model that help improvement efforts. Furthermore, please refer additional information from this publication.

Georgise, F., Thoben, K. D., & Seifert, M. (2012). Adapting the SCOR Model to Suit the Different Scenarios: A Literature Review & Research Agenda. International Journal of Business & Management, 7(6).

Dear Prof Fasika, I completely agree with you. You cannot just transplant models/practices from developed countries to emerging economy. Any management practice is culture and context specific. While implementing for unorganized sector, one has to understand the culture and the context in which such supply chain practices are to be implemented.

As I have worked in India, I know quite well the indian context for example; there is a huge potential to develop new approaches related of human-oriented supply chains. The big number of employees around the activities makes managing the SCM as much complex as company management. I am working on such topics, where human factors are the center of the performance on the SC, such as identifying the impact of trust between individuals on the SC level to improve lead-times. On the informational side, there is an interest to tackle unstructured information and use the implicit knowledge of logistics, production and SC managers for a better integrate in decision making.

This discussion is becoming interesting. The unorganized sector has some typical characteristics. I am referring to an Indian context:

a) There are NO established SOPs .

b) decision making is on ad-hoc basis,

c) The customer base, in general, not very demanding and there may not be much pressure from this base

d)at some point, unorganized sector may act as input feeder to organised sector,

e) Unorganized sector is human intensive rather than technology intensive.