Nanotechnology Supply Chain Management

Nanotechnology is one of the most popular and promising among emerging technologies. This multidisciplinary field has immense commercialisation prospects due to its potential to be applied into practically any application or technology. As a business venture, there is a dearth of literary works that focus on supply chain management practices (SCM) in the nanotechnology industry. A survey was conducted among a random population of nanotechnology related companies to understand the general adoption of SCM by nanotechnology. The study has indicated the highly customer centric nature of the nanotechnology industry and its global presence that is stronger in North America, Europe and East Asia. The primary focus of the industry is centred on on-time delivery, quality, customer satisfaction, and supplier performance; whilst the outsourcing of production, logistics, and other functions are appearing with moderate focus on performance evaluation along the supply chain. However, the adoption of Information Systems (IS) was found to be very weak and the majority of the small business ventures was not very concerned with SCM practices or IS adoption in their current business situation.