New book offers guidelines for evaluating 10 world regions

When a company plans to begin doing business in a new region of the world or to expand in a region where it already has a presence, supply chain executives typically are tasked with conducting a strategic assessment of the factors that can influence decisions about procurement, manufacturing, logistics, distribution, and more. For suggestions on how to do that, they can turn to a new book that offers a systematic approach to evaluating 10 world regions with respect to their supply chain activities.

In Global Supply Chains: Evaluating Regions on an EPIC Framework—Economy, Politics, Infrastructure and Competence, co-authors Mandyam Srinivasan, Theodore Stank, and Kenneth J. Petersen of the University of Tennessee, and Phillippe-Pierre Dornier of ESSEC Business School in Paris, explain how to assess the supply chain "maturity level" using the "EPIC" framework.

As the book title notes, EPIC stands for economy, politics, infrastructure, and competence. Using the EPIC framework, the authors assess the maturity level of 10 regions: East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, North and Central America, and South America.

Supply chain managers can use the framework and the research data in the book to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for each region. With this information in hand, the book's authors say, managers can then determine the proper strategy for managing their supply chains in those regions.

The 476-page Global Supply Chains: Evaluating Regions on an EPIC Framework—Economy, Politics, Infrastructure and Competence is published by McGraw-Hill and sells for $70 in hardcover.