This paper is a state of the art review of trends, theories and practices in production and logistic networks and the evaluation of supply chains. The paper outlines the progression of concepts from supply chains to the definition of production networks, summarises the trends for virtual companies and outlines recent research in logistics. The use of competence profiling is reviewed for selecting companies for a network, on the basis of core competencies. New methodologies for performance assessment of production networks are also reviewed, together with well established benchmarks arising from the lean and agile methodologies.