30-11-2012, 05:31 PM
ELECTRONIC SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT: SOME LATEST
ISSUES AND PRACTICES
Electronic Supply Chain Management- Some latest issues and Practices.pdf (Size: 40.07 KB / Downloads: 56)
Abstract:
Supply chain management (SCM), a management method to optimize internal costs and
productivities, has evolved as an application of e-business technologies. SCM is a powerful
strategic function capable of radically improving customer value propositions by the reengineering of
intranet and internet-enabled collaborative channel partnerships. Latest developments in
information technology have propelled the e-Supply Chain Management (e-SCM) concept to newer
dimensions. In the past, neither markets nor products changed much over time, enterprises
that gained initial superiority could leverage on, considerable resources and process knowledge,
mature distribution channels, advertising and marketing clout, and the newest technologies, to
maintain that lead. Today, it is evident that there is no such thing as sustainable competitive
advantage and also that all advantages are temporary. The cause for the rapid acceleration in the
erosion of competitive advantage in almost all the businesses can be traced back to the rapidly
developing newer technologies. Still more deadly is the sudden growth of newer business models
that have been quick in challenging the present leaders by leveraging on special competencies
which permit them to invade the market and conquer the targeted customer segments better. This
paper conducts an extensive literature review to identify the latest trends in e-SCM. It also attempts
to study some of the issues associated with e-SCM along with their solutions and practices.
Introduction
As energy costs continue to rise, manufacturing
and service companies have looked to their supply
chains as important areas for strategic cost
reduction and competitive advantage. The problem
is that most companies have already picked the
low-hanging fruit in supply chain savings through
economies of scale, consolidating source materials
and other measures. As businesses search for
other efficiencies, one opportunity is streamlining
supply chain management. The internet is playing
an increasing role in the search for efficient supply
chain management (SCM), but the novelty of both
the concept of SCM and the internet has placed the
combination of the two in the position of finding the
right balance of both [1]. The Internet has many
impacts on the supply chain. One of the most
covered topics in the literature is the impact of ebusiness,
which refers to the ability of a firm to
electronically connect, in multiple ways, many
organizations, both internally and externally, for
many different purposes [2]. Another impact refers
to information sharing, how the Internet can be
used as a medium to access and transmit
information among supply chain partners [3].
However, the Internet not only enables supply
chain partners to access and share information, but
also to create, storage, dissemination and
application of organizational knowledge. This third
type of impact of the Internet on SCM is called
knowledge management (KM). There is no
universal definition of KM. KM refers to the set of
processes or practice of developing in an
organization the ability to create, acquire, capture
store, maintain and disseminate the organization's
knowledge [4]. This paper examines the following
areas in detail.
2. E-business and supply chain management
To achieve joint optimization of key SCM decisions,
it is preferable that there be a free flow of all
relevant information across the entire chain leading
to a comprehensive analysis. An overview of
information flows facilitated through e-business
technologies in a supply chain are shown in Figure
1. As can be seen in this figure e-business
technologies facilitate information sharing either in
supply chains using a number of technologies like
enterprise resource planning (ERP), point of sale
(POS), and /or vendor managed inventory (VMI).
Further, the focus of information sharing is to
facilitate integrated and/or coordinated decision
making in supply chains. This leads to several
potential research issues in this interdisciplinary
area, and this paper address some of them. In
general, we can classify these research
contributions as adopting either a strategic or
tactical focus.
Tactical Focus
There are several tactical issues of interest in ebusiness
and SCM. To start with, Business-to-
Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C)
exchanges are dramatically changing the manner in
which supply chain activities must be structured.
Bapna and Goes [9] study B2C online auctions over
an open-source, ubiquitous Internet protocol
computer network. They develop an analytical
model that characterizes the revenue generation
process for Yankee auctions used to sell multiple
identical units of a good to multiple buyers. The
model is validated using empirical and simulated
data. From a theoretical perspective, their
contribution is the design of a partitioning scheme
of the discrete valuation space of the bidders such
that equilibrium points with higher revenue
structures become identifiable and feasible. From a
practical perspective, they find that auctioneers are,
most of the time, far away from the optimal choice
of key control factors such as the bid increment,
resulting in substantial losses in a market with
already tight margins. To address this shortcoming,
they propose a set of tools, varying in their level of
abstraction and information intensity requirements,
which could be used by auctioneers to maximize
their revenues.