difference between purchase of raw materials and getting finished goods paid. Longer
this cycle means more investment in working capital. Reducing CCC to a reasonable
minimum, generally, leads to improved profitability (Karaduman et al., 2011; Jose et al.,
1996):
CCC number of days inventories number of days accounts receivable
number of days accounts payable
3. Methodology of literature review
As advocated by Fink (2005), a literature review must use methodology which is
systematic in approach, explicit in describing the procedures by which it was
conducted and comprehensive in its scope of including all relevant material related
to particular phenomena. Following Tranfield et al. (2003), we have used systematic
literature review (SLR) methodology in this paper. The adapted review process for
identifying the issues and future avenues in WCM research is categorized in four
phases, as shown in Figure 2.
3.1 Literature collection and boundary identification
In this paper, we have conducted a search for published journal articles on WCM in
many databases to cover a comprehensive and diverse range of articles for review. We
used the following databases: EBSCO, Elsevier Science direct, Emerald and Sciverse
Scopus for searching articles. We started with a keyword search and then delimited the
literature thereafter. Thus, it is a combination of deductive and inductive approaches
(Shukla and Jharkharia, 2013). Initially, a huge amount of literature was found by key
word search. Because it was not possible to review all found literature, we have
developed some delimiting boundaries for screening the literature. These boundaries
were given as:
• papers published only in peer-reviewed academic journals were considered;
• papers were collected for 32 years (1980-2012); and
• papers with full-text available were considered.
Article which satisfied all listed delimiting conditions was included in the sample for
further screening. For compiling the article sample, a literature search was carried
Step-1
Step-2
Step-3
Step-4
Data identification and article selection
Description and classification of literature
Detailed content and citation anal is of articles
Reporting of findings and research gaps