... Emerald Group Publishing Limited 2004 Materials management Service delivery Outsourcing Distribution management The outsourcing of business logistics functions to third parties has become a widely observed phenomenon in recent years. Third party logistics (3PL) is a rapidly growing...

... meals (Fransoo and Wouters, 2000); paper making (Hameri, 1996); and electronic products (Van Aken, 1978). © MCB UP Limited 2002 Supply‐chain management Materials management Flow production Bullwhip, as recently coined by Lee et al. (1997), is still an extensive...

... of interests between marketing, production and materials management. Marketing wants the complete product range available off‐the‐shelf; production is still, all too often, looking to manufacture in economic batch quantities so as to achieve economies of scale; and materials management is trying to minimize...