Adoption of Supply Chain Management in German Agrifood Networks

Supply chain management has emerged as cross functional, cross company concept to improve coordination of entire value chains through coordinated actions of all companies. It has received a major push from the availability of Internet-based information and communication technologies. The conditions in certain sectors are favorable for a realization of chain wide supply chain management. In other sectors such as the food sector, however, conditions are more complex and companies and value chains still struggle to exploit the potentials from supply chain management, in particular when it comes to cross enterprise coordination. This paper analyses the case of complex food supply networks and follows the research question why complex networks do not exploit the potentials from cross enterprise supply chain management. It provides empirical results on reasons for and barriers to the adoption of electronic tools for supply chain management.