In February 2017, a commissioning company was launching a new product. They had no existing data and infrastructure and had to build the supply chain from scratch. Their primary goal was to create the preliminary draft of a handbook that the company could use as a reference should anyone have questions about their supply chain operations. This thesis tries to help them address this business challenge by seeking to discover if there is an underlying, universal framework that the company could use to build their supply chain correctly from the very beginning.

Much of the theoretical literature available, however, focused on supply chain redesign instead of building supply chains from scratch. Some of the literature researched also suggested that because of the complexity of supply chains, the best approach to designing a supply chain would differ from case to case. This became especially clear when several authors, who are notable experts in their field, came up with very different supply chain design frameworks. One common theme found in all the literature was the need to create a good SC (supply chain) strategy. However, there were again several approaches that could be taken in this process.

The original plan then had to be modified, and the commissioning company selected a pre-existing framework to help build a tailor-made framework. A workbook was made instead of a handbook because the commissioning company did not have time to tailor the framework. The framework they selected, however, appeared to be a mismatch for the company since they did not end up using it.

Because there were no clear patterns in the research literature that could be discovered, it had to be concluded that no universal framework for SC design exists at this time. However, there do appear to be some common elements in well-designed supply chains. With further research, a universal framework could be uncovered.