Analyzing the Risks in Supply Chain Information System Implementations

2. Supply Chain Information System

Christopher and Juttner (2000) argue that to develop more effective and longer-term relationships among the members of the supply chain, it is important to have better collaboration and integration among them. SCM systems have been categorized by Talluri (2000) into three domains, i.e., strategic, tactical, and operational planning systems. He applied mathematical goal programing for optimizing the solution. But the big debate remains that all the attributes may not be quantifiable. This forces the attributes to be restricted mainly to the quantitative factors, such as costs, benefits, and time factors as shown by Sarkis and Sundarraj (2000). Beach and Muhlemann (2000), Sohal et al. (2002) have adopted techniques like exploratory method, case studies, and meta-methodology to avoid such problems. A SCIS selection and implementation is a group multiple attribute decision-making (MADM) problem where some measures may not be easily quantifiable with exact numerical values. In such cases the decision makers may be more comfortable to express their ratings in natural language rather than in numbers (Chen and Hwang, 1992).