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Supply chain management represents a
major managerial innovation of the 1990s. It has
transformed our traditionally intrafirm orientation
toward the management of physical flow operations
into a strategic interorganizational perspective.
The advent of e-business has helped to further
extend the supply chain and operations management
concepts to a global and real-time level. Many
e-businesses ventures used the connectivity of the
Internet to innovate in terms of transforming the
global supply chains for both digital and physical
products. The first case of this Part describes the
context and entrepreneurial efforts aimed at the
transformation of the supply chain of a service
industry: Linux technical support. It also
introduces readers to the growing “community-based”
open-source movement for software development and to
the operational business processes required for
service provision over the Internet. The case can be
used to illustrate how operational supply chain
processes shape the functionality of the e-business
engine developed to serve as a Web-based
marketplace. The case also illustrates technical and
managerial issues involved in the operational
development of the e-business engine.
The
second case focuses on the operational processes,
technical development, and change management aspects
of reengineering the supply chain practices of the
fish and seafood industry. It provides a rich
context for investigating trading models for
business-to-business transactions over the Web by
detailing the operational intricacies of Web
cataloguing, auctioning, and contract sale business
processes. Additionally, it discusses some of the
legal and privacy issues involved in e-business
operations and illustrates how these influence the
design of the user interface and business processes.
It also brings a process perspective to the supply
chain to clarify the systems development approach
used for developing the technical architecture.
Given that change management issues are an integral
component of e-business operations, the case
provides material that can be used to explore the
major risk factors in the implementation of
e-business operations designed to transform an
industry’s supply chain.
The
readings for this Part provide a conceptual model
and integration framework for exploring various
issues pertaining to the link between e-business and
supply chain management. These include demand and
supply chain integration, information integration
and the bullwhip effect, and supply chain
collaboration activities pertaining to shared demand
forecasts, capacity plans, production schedules,
inventory status, and shipment schedules. Another
key aspect that can be explored is the intertwined
operational relationship between marketing, customer
relationship management, and demand-supply chain
management in e-business organizations.
Reading 1: Lee & Whang (1999)
Reading 2: Girard
(1999)
Reading 3: Shankar (2001) |