Abstract
The web is having a significant impact on
how firms interact with each other and their customers. Past stumbling blocks
for supply chain integration such as high transaction costs between partners,
poor information availability, and the challenges of managing complex
interfaces between functional organizations are all dissolving on the web. In this
paper, we examine how the web is changing supply chain management. We present a
survey of emerging research on the impact of e-business on supply chain
management including descriptive frameworks, analytical models, empirical
analysis, and case studies.
We classify the work into three major
categories: e-Commerce, e-Procurement, and e- Collaboration.
Introduction
Nothing has rocked the young field of supply chain management like the emergence of the Internet. While the management
of information flows have always been a key aspect of supply chain management,
the rapid growth of web-based information transfer between companies, their
suppliers, and their customers has decidedly increased the importance of
information management in creating effective supply chains. Indeed, the Internet
has emerged as a most cost-effective means of driving supply chain integration.
We define e-Business as the marriage between the Internet and supply chain
integration. This marriage is transforming many processes within the supply
chain from procurement to customer management and product design. In this paper, we explore how e-Business is changing supply chains and examine the rapidly
evolving research in this area. Following the framework of Lee and Whang (2002c),
we divide the various forms of e-Business applications into three categories
e- Commerce, e-Procurement, and e-Collaboration (Figure 1). e-Commerce helps a network
of supply chain partners to identify and respond quickly to changing customer demand
captured over the Internet.
e-Procurement allows companies to use the
Internet for procuring direct or indirect materials, as well as handling
value-added services like transportation, warehousing, customs clearing,
payment, quality validation, and documentation. e-Collaboration facilitates
coordination of various decisions and activities beyond transactions among the
supply chain partners, both suppliers and customers, over the Internet. For
example, coordination of engineering changes in the bill-of-materials for a product that is manufactured by an outsourced partner. The remainder of this paper is broken
into three sections examining research in these three forms of e-Business. In
our survey, we include a wide range of research, from classical model building
and empirical studies to cases and frameworks. At the end of each section, we
review the papers included in this special issue of POMS, relating them to the
earlier work. Given the early stage of research in this area, much of the
published.
Figure 1. e-Business forms and their
impact on the supply chain
