Making sense of the e-supply chain landscape: an implementation framework

Abstract

Firms are increasingly embracing integrated Web-based or e-supply chains because such chains are believed to enhance efficiency and competitiveness. The e-supply chain movement has received a boost from a variety of off-the-shelf supply chain software solutions that have appeared on the market. However, in the excitement about these software solutions, it is often overlooked that creation and implementation of integrated supply chains requires tremendous resources, a great deal of management time and energy, large organization-wide changes, huge commitment from suppliers/partners, and sophisticated technical infrastructure. Further, a standard solution cannot fit all types of supply chains because different chains have different requirements. Then, many firms may not want to use such off-the-shelf software solutions because they already have some components of an e-supply chain in place. Therefore, before embracing e-supply chains, firms need to understand different options for creating supply chains from among which they can pick the option they can successfully implement, keeping in view their resources and their ability to handle associated challenges. In this paper we develop a framework that captures various approaches to supply chain implementation for different supply chain requirements. To develop the framework, we draw on research in a wide variety of areas, discussions with professionals who were involved in creating e-supply chain systems, and a detailed study of two companies that recently installed e-supply chain systems.