Coordination Begins at Home: Measuring Coordination Complementarities in Supply Chain Environments

This research-in-progress presents a framework, grounded in Coordination theory (Thompson, 1967), to examine coordination as a complementary investment to the business value of Supply Chain Management (SCM) environments. Given that one of the objectives of a SCM is to reduce transaction costs, including coordination costs, this framework proposes that for supply chains to prosper, the technology must support the appropriate interand intra-organizational coordination mechanisms. We propose using scenario analysis to measure the information technology payoff in a firm by measuring the appropriateness of its coordination mechanism.