A “seamless supply chain” where territorial boundaries between trading partners are eliminated allowing them to operate effectively as if they were part of one organization. Supply chain integration typically encompasses three distinct, albeit related, elements: One element is mainly concerned with the sharing of information among members of the supply chain, for example, demand information, inventory status, capacity plans, production schedules, promotion plans, demand forecasts, and shipment schedules (information integration). The second element refers to tightening organizational relationships between firms (organizational linkage), and the third element refers to the redeployment of decision rights, work, and/or resources to the “best-positioned” supply chain member (coordination).
Published in Chapter:
E-Markets as Meta-Enterprise Information e Systems
Martin Grieger (Accenture, Germany), Evi Hartmann (SMI Supply Management Institute, Germany), and Herbert Kotzab (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 9
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-885-7.ch063
Abstract
Electronic marketplaces are inter-organizational information sharing systems that enable virtual business transactions and allow the exchange of price and product information between buyers and sellers (Kollmann, 2000). For many decades, such information systems were solely utilized for buying and selling of goods under “market conditions.” With the emergence of advanced IT, academia, and also businesses have begun to use electronic marketplaces for information sharing system and it is no longer only a medium for electronic buying and selling processes. In addition, electronic marketplaces are predicted to be a key-stone for integrating the information flows within inter-organizational systems such as supply chains (Grieger, 2004) where borderless organizational structures occur (see Picot, Reichwald, R., Wigand, 2001).