Supply chain challenges of North-European paper industry

Purpose – Owing to the consolidation and globalization of the paper industry, manufacturing units have keen interest to focus on particular product groups. While this specialization will create opportunities for scale economics in production, management of supply chains becomes increasingly challenging, as one particular manufacturing unit serves a number of different sales locations. The aim of this paper is to identify improvement areas in the new supply chain context of paper production, and possibly give further support for the general discipline development.Design/methodology/approach – Research work is based on two different case studies completed for one major North‐European paper manufacturer, which is mostly serving its customers in Europe and the USA. The first case study (a preliminary one) started when supply chain challenges were recognized at the end of the 1990s, and a manufacturing unit was seeking managerial remedies – this investigation only concerned one manufacturing unit, while not si...

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