Recent developments in operations and supply chain management in Latin America

Citation

Correa, H. (2007), "Recent developments in operations and supply chain management in Latin America", International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol. 27 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijopm.2007.02427eaa.001

Recent developments in operations and supply chain management in Latin America

Dr Henrique CorrêaVisiting Professor of Operations Management at Crummer Graduate School of Business, Rollins College, Florida, USA, where he teaches courses in operations management and global supply chain management. He was awarded a PhD degree from the University of Warwick Business School (UK) and previously taught at the FGV Business School (Brazil). He has also held appointments and visiting appointments at the University of São Paulo (Brazil), Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), University of Warwick (UK), IESA (Venezuela) and INCAE (Costa Rica), among others. His research interests include global operations strategy, flexibility and global supply chain management. He has published in academic journals including the International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Integrated Manufacturing Systems, Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems, and International Journal of Logistics Systems Management. Corrêa has authored or co-authored seven books in the fields of operations strategy, service operations management and manufacturing planning and control systems. He has consulted with leading companies such as 3M, Unilever, General Motors, Ely Lilly, Pepsico and Embraer. Currently, Corrêa serves as Vice President for the Americas in the Production Operations Management Society (POMS).

Recent developments in operations and supply chain management in Latin America

This special issue of IJOPM aims at building on an effort to further integrate Latin America with the operations management (OM) international community. This effort started in 1997 when Professor Gordon Wills, one of the Directors of MCB University Press, now Emerald (the publisher of IJOPM), visited Latin America in an attempt to encourage more Latin American authors to publish in their journals. He suggested that I edited a special issue of IJOPM on “Operations Management in Latin America”. During the process of publicizing the call for papers, I started to understand why the Latin American OM academics and practitioners were so weakly integrated with the international community: there was no intra-region integration in the first place. I had tremendous difficulty to find databases and mailing lists of OM professionals: just one local book publisher had one mailing list of professors. Although the community of production engineers in Brazil was slightly more organized, there was virtually no body, organization or event that played an integrative role to connect the OM community.

Eventually the special issue on “Operations Management in Latin America” was published in IJOPM as Number 3 of Volume 18 (1998), with six papers selected out of only 14 submitted. From 1998, things have changed substantially on the OM front in Latin America. 1998 was the first year of the Annual International Symposium of Operations Management (SIMPOI), hosted by FGV Business School, which in the following ten years grew tremendously in attendance and importance, having become the most important annual event in the field of OM in Latin America. Now the Latin American community has a yearly event where they can network, exchange knowledge and share research initiatives. In 2001, I was honored to serve as co-chairman (together with FGV Professor Marcos Vasconcellos) of the joint V SIMPOI – 2001 POMS International Conference, held in Guaruja, Brazil with the presence of around 60 researchers from countries outside LA and more than 400 Latin American researchers, practitioners and academics.

The increase in the level of integration of Latin America with the international OM community can also be noticed by the fast increasing number of Latin American researchers in international OM conferences such as POMS and EurOMA and by the creation in 2006, of the Latin American chapter of POMS. 2007 will see the second joint SIMPOI – POMS International Conference to be held in Rio de Janeiro in August (see www.simpoi.fgvsp.br for more information).

Having witnessed all these changes from the mid-1990s, I suggested, in 2005, to the regular editors of IJOPM that we edited a second special issue, now on “Recent developments in operations and supply chain management in Latin America” to reflect such changes. Suggestion accepted, I started to send out the call for papers. It was emblematic that the process was completely different as compared to the editing of the first special issue. Firstly, we had databases and mailing lists to rely on (SIMPOI, POMS, EurOMA), with substantial presence of Latin American researchers. Secondly, the amount and level of research conducted in the region, and conducted overseas about the region, has increased substantially. The result was that we had not 14 but 51 papers initially submitted. We then involved 109 reviewers, from 14 countries, in the blind review process. As a result, we had six papers accepted for publication that display a representative picture of the research currently conducted in the region: a blend of different research methodologies, approaches, themes, scopes and author's countries and affiliations.

The first three papers deal conceptually and empirically with operations strategy. Corrêa, Ellram, Scavarda and Cooper propose an alternative way of looking at “value packages” offered to customers from an OM point of view, challenging the more traditional view of the “service-goods” dichotomy. They contend that the appropriate management of value packages is particularly important for Latin American operations as a defensive strategy against foreign competition, because the increased locally produced service content in a value package is more difficult to be matched by foreign competitors that merely ship in lower priced products (e.g. Chinese products in recent years).

Brito, Aguilar and Brito work with the marketing and competitive operations interface at the individual company level. They empirically analyze the service operations of car dealers in Brazil to explore the relationship between the importance of performance attributes and the customer choice of supplier. Their argument is that an over-emphasis on the wrong performance attributes (e.g. one that is rated as important by customers but has little effect on their choice of supplier) can lead to poor operations decision making. Along similar lines, Tontini and Silveira, still dealing with competitive operations at the company level, challenge the importance – performance competitive analysis method and the Kano model. They analyze a small service business to propose an innovative and simple method of identifying performance attributes that can better direct operations improvement efforts in small service businesses.

The three last papers deal empirically and normatively with supply chain management issues in Latin America. Mesquita, Lazzarini and Cronin use the Brazilian auto-parts industry to empirically analyze the impact that a stronger participation in institutional organizations brings to the effectiveness of inter-firm (e.g. customer-supplier) links, concluding that the combination of inter-firm and institutional associations lead to stronger performance. Their conclusion supports and re-enforces the concept that more integration in supply chains leads to superior performance and highlights the important role that institutional organizations can have in supporting integration efforts.

Integration in supply chains and its role in national industry competitiveness is also the theme of the article by Singer and Donoso. They study the sawmill industry in Chile and demonstrate by developing and applying a normative model that profitability can be substantially increased in commodity production if the traditional paradigm that improvements are achieved by enhancements at each individual plant is challenged and replaced by a more collaborative approach between (even competing) plants at the country level.

Finally, Wanke, Arkader and Hijjar close the special issue with their analysis of the important decision of outsourcing logistics services. Based on a survey including 93 large Brazilian shippers, they empirically study the correlations between the type (mainly, in terms of the level of sophistication) of the logistics service outsourced and the process choice of the shipper and, the choice of third party logistics provider (3PL). They find some interesting correlations that can help understand the decision-making process of Latin American firms as related to 3PL.

I hope this set of papers can reflect some of the efforts that have been put in by Latin American OM researchers and by researchers from other regions studying LA to help develop the field and to support LA economies to keep up with the fast pace of performance improvement currently required from individuals, organizations, countries and regions to become or remain competitive in the global market place.

I would like to take the opportunity to thank all the blind referees involved in this special issue for their invaluable contribution and particularly I would like to thank the editors of the IJOPM, Dr Margaret Webster and Professor Andrew Taylor for their support and help in editing this special issue.

Henrique CorreaGuest Editor