The Impacts of Organizational Contingency Factors on Inter-organizational Information Sharing and Supply Chain Integration Performance

As the environmental changing violently, almost all enterprises can’t survive without other enterprises’ cooperation. Many firms have tied with each other and formed an industrial chain structure relationship aggressively called as ‘Supply Chain Relationship’. Therefore, many enterprises had striving for industrial stream integration. With these integration processes, may go through some methods to achieve firms’ goals of reducing cost, shorten product lifecycle, quick response customers’ demand etc.. Supply chain integration may assist enterprises to keep their competitive advantage by improving the enterprise processing effectively for facing the changeable market. ‘Supply Chain Integration’ could be divided into four parts to discuss that include cash flow, logistic flow, product flow and information flow. Before firms want to integrate cash flow, logistic flow, product flow it’s better to integrate ‘information flow’ firstly. According to all product flow, logistic flow and cash flow of firms are based on their smoothing information operation. Therefore, it is not hard to find that information integration is a key factor for supply chain integration. Although information integration is a very important factor for supply chain integration, there are existing some dilemmas on sharing information within many firms. It is necessary for most of firms to contain the parts of private information that may increase their bargaining power but that secret contains of information sharing for individual firm are helpless for related firms to achieve supply chain integration. Therein, interorganizational information sharing is a key issue worthily in supply chain integration. The result of this study had proposed 14 propositions may further engage in some empirical study in the near future. INTRODUCTION To maintain a leadership position in the fierce competition of the global market, capability for global logistics is the key point. To address that issue, modern businesses invest in supply chain management (SCM) to effectively integrate activities between manufacturers and suppliers.