Mozart Menezes (Kedge Business School) and I, Diego Ruiz-Hernandez, are organising a track at MIM 2019 (9th IFAC/IFIP/IFORS/IISE/INFORMS Conference on Manufacturing Modelling, Management and Control) to be held in Berlin on 28-30 of August, 2019. The focus is on the holistic understanding of the link between supply chain decisions and financial performance.

Companies struggle to improve their financial indicators in highly competitive environments, and encourage the organisation to use the proliferation of products, markets, and channels, as a mechanism for capturing additional revenue for sustaining growth. This proliferation, to which we refer to as structural complexity, is likely to bring increases in revenues but those increases are hardly reflected in the operating profits. Although structural complexity seems to be a very big issue in managing todays’ business (a simple Google search  for '“supply chain complexity”' or “operational complexity” brings over 250,000 results) and preliminary empirical results suggest that companies may lose up to 10 percent points (or more) of operating profits due to complexity, there is not an organised space for researchers working on this cross-functional areas topic, to exchange ideas. This track wants to fill that void.  The track aims at bringing together papers (interdisciplinary work is highly encouraged) that address supply chain complexity from many angles.

We accept quantitative and qualitative papers on the subject with an empirical view or theoretically leaning approaches. Papers that discuss performance loss (operation or financial) due to multiplicity of products, markets, and channels, are welcomed. That includes, but is not limited to, loss of forecasting accuracy due to (broadly defined) supply chain complexity, or behavioural experiments that help to shed light on the issue of complexity-induced performance loss in the supply chain. We also encourage the submission of system dynamics and discrete simulation based papers on this subject. Papers of facility location and network design topics that focus on multiple products and markets are also welcome. General facility location or transportation/routing investigations that highlight the issues involved when the numbers of products grow will be of special interest.

We would like to use this conference as an opportunity and a platform for organising a group, interested in supply chain complexity issues, for planning beyond this conference. Depending on the answers to this “call of duty”, we will organise a social event for allowing us to get acquainted with each other. We hope you will get on board in this initiative with us.