A Journey into the European Supply Chains: Key Industries and Best Practices

Macro-trends and sectoral-specific evolutions are changing the way companies produce, distribute and build relationships in their supply network and with customers. Aiming to investigate the effective implementation of new supply chain concepts and innovation needs identified in the previous sections, this chapter provides a study of multiple cases of excellence among European supply chains. It depicts an overview of major trends and structural features of 8 key industries for European economy, i.e. Automotive, Aerospace, Fashion, Chemical, IT, Distribution/ logistics, Furniture, Food and Beverage. For each industry, a structured investigation into one or more companies was performed with a total of 18 companies involved. The results identify possible matchings in relation to supply chain strategies, and good and best practices adopted accordingly.