A Review on the Integration of Supply Chain Management and Industrial Cluster

Although Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Industrial Cluster (IC) are two different fields of study, it has been identified that there is a natural and internal relationship between these two theories. Most of research works depict that, integration of the two concepts is in its infancy. The aim of this research is to review the integration between supply chain management and industrial cluster, at the same time to identify the gap and propose solution. To achieve the research aim, two pairs of keywords namely “supply chain” and “industrial cluster” were used, to track literatures from the online databases. The search initially identified over 46 articles. After further screening, they were reduced to 17. Finally, contents of these articles were analyzed based on their general focus area. From the content analysis, considerable evidences are found in the literature review on the integration of supply chain management with industrial cluster. The entire emphasis of the previous researches was on cluster supply chain (CSC) management, which highly promotes efficient operations of industrial clusters. Most of the CSC articles focused on the importance of cluster supply chain. However, there are few researches in the design, implementation and improvement of cluster supply chain. On the other hand, the role of industrial clusters in a global supply chain management and benchmarking of best practices have not yet been given the attention they deserve in previous studies. This is one of the first studies which critically examine researches that deal about supply chain management and industrial cluster integration theories.