Supply Chain Management (SCM) – Is it Value Addition towards Academia?

This keynote paper illustrates the theory and evolution of Supply Chain Management (SCM) as well as highlights chronological prospective of SCM in terms of time frame in different areas of manufacturing and service industries. The objective of SCM is to incorporate activities across and within organizations for providing the customer/stakeholders value. Supply Chain Management (SCM) has been widely researched in numerous application domains during the last few decades. Despite the popularity of SCM research and applications, considerable confusion remains as to its meaning, there are several attempts made by researchers and practitioners to appropriately define SCM. This paper demonstrates Educational Supply Chain Management, Integrated Tertiary Educational Supply Chain Management (ITESCM) model, as the application of SCM in the service industry, which would add the values towards academia. ITESCM model were identified and confirmed by 493 respondents, representing experts and administrators, faculty, staffs of the university, employers, graduates, etc. The resulting model was subsequently evaluated for accuracy and validity by multiple linear regressions (MLR) analysis and the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. The research model provides a novel approach for decision makers of each supply chain components to review and appraise their performance toward fulfillment of ultimate goals i.e. producing high-caliber graduates and high-impact research outcomes, which represent two main contributions, for the betterment of the end customer, i.e., the society.