Supply Chain Differentiation : Background, Concept and Examples

The purpose of this paper is to provide new evidence in the field of supply chain differentiation. It aims to combine insights of supply chain management with the service dominant logic to connect fundamental customer requirements with supply chain decision-making. The paper claims to provide a framework that brings together the most relevant factors in the context of supply chain differentiation. The contents of the framework were applied as source to develop a generic decision support flowchart for supply chain executives. From the perspective of “test consumers”—supplemented with secondary data—two cases were examined. The cases provide insights for supply chain differentiation approaches of Adidas and Lego®. The crucial factor to link customer requirements with supply chain settings turned out to be the magnitude of customer co-creation along the value chain under consideration of synergies across the channels. The framework provides the opportunity to structure the complex multi-criteria decision problem constituted by supply chain differentiation. The paper provides helpful insights that could be used as starting point for the development of several industry specific decision-finding models or applications in supply chain differentiation.