"Management is on the verge of a major breakthrough in understanding how industrial company success depends on the interactions between the flows of information, materials, money, manpower, and capital equipment. The way these five flow systems interlock to amplify one another and to cause change and fluctuation will form the basis for anticipating the effects of decisions, policies, organizational forms, and investment choices." (Forrester 1958, p. 37) Forrester introduced a theory of distribution management that recognized the integrated nature of organizational relationships. Because organizations are so intertwined, he argued that system dynamics can influence the performance of functions such as research, engineering, sales, and promotion.

Studies linking environmental sustainability to firm performance have been increasing as more companies are contemplating the implementation of sustainable practices internally and in coordination with other firms along their supply chains. However, findings from these studies have found positive and negative associations, leaving practitioners perplexed as to what actions would be beneficial to pursue. With hypotheses grounded in the natural resource-based view of the firm, the current study examines over 20 years of research on environmental supply chain practices using a meta-analysis to determine whether the overall effect of these specific practices on firm performance is, in fact, positive. The results show that the link between environmental supply chain practices and market-based, operational-based and accounting-based forms of firm performance is positive and significant, providing support for the business case that sustainable supply chain management results in increased firm performance. Different operationalizations of supply chain practicesupstream, design, production and downstream -along with industry, sample region, firm size and time are examined as moderators of this relationship with nuanced results that help to extend the discipline's understanding of the relationship between environmentally sustainable supply chain management and firm performance.

The article titled “Defining Supply Chain Management” published in 2001 in the Journal of Business Logistics has been cited over 4,900 times in the last 17 years. In this paper, we first provide a historical review of how the article originated and the contributions the article made to both the theory and practice of supply chain management (SCM). Next, we highlight the key market and technological changes that have emerged in SCM followed by how the theory proposed in the 2001 article can still be relevant to support SCM research and practice going forward. We also propose ways of configuring a supply chain and partnering across companies to serve customers in an optimal way. We conclude with a call for research on developing new frameworks to better describe, explain, predict, and shed light on the evolving nature of SCM.

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