The purpose of this paper is to analyse how the role of the plant in a manufacturing network (MN) affects the configurations of the flows of goods among plants, suppliers and customers and how these configurations, in turn, affect the extent of adoption and effectiveness of supply chain (SC) integration.
Three research questions are developed at the plant level and then tested using an international survey (IMSS 6) featuring 364 plants which are part of an intra-company MN from 18 countries.
Five configurations of flows of goods emerge from the analysis. These configurations appear to be related to the role of the plant in the network and to the effectiveness of SC integration practices, but not to their extent of adoption.
Research limitations include the focus on specific industries (assembly industries) and limited size of the clusters which did not allow for a deep investigation of each single cluster.
The paper creates a bridge between two literature streams (MNs and SC management) by means of an innovative flow-based perspective that can help researchers and practitioners to disentangle the two interwoven perspectives.
