Electronic supply chains: Status & perspective

The area of e-commerce based supply chains (or e-supply chains) has received significant attention in the last two decades. Despite the high level of activity, the most recent reviews on this topic date back to the beginning of this century. In this paper, we analyzed the state of e-supply chain research published during January 2000–January 2015 AD, covering 165 articles from 47 ISI indexed journals. The analysis is performed using a five-dimensional framework comprising Topic-of-Study, Unit-of-Analysis, Research Perspective, Industry Type, and Research Method. Within these dimensions, Topic-of-Study plays a pivotal role, whereas the other four dimensions are analyzed around its sub-classification scheme. Our main objective is to establish a broader interdisciplinary understanding of the e-supply chain research domain, and to identify trends and gaps in contemporary e-supply chain theory and practice. The findings indicate that problems are addressed from different perspectives with varying levels of interest from researchers belonging to several academic disciplines including business, economics, engineering and social sciences. Our analysis also identified two distinct periods (2000–2006 and 2007 onwards) with different foci of research attention. The problems that received significant attention in the earlier period include innovation, adoption and barriers, and supply chain integration; while in the latter period, the focus seemed to have shifted towards supply chain integration and collaboration issues. Problems that received minimum interest across the two periods include customer relationship, economic and environmental impact.