Adoption of Supply Chain Management Technologies by Small and Medium Enterprises in the Manufacturing Sector

SMEs today are under pressure to better manage the supply chain and to improve efficiency and logistics operations while remaining responsive to changing market conditions and customer demands. As a result, organisations might need to adopt Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to support their supply chains and increase their efficiency by achieving tighter cooperation relationship over the supply-chain. This paper explores the area of ICT adoption in The Taiwanese IT manufacturing sector based on multiple case study research. The findings suggest that SMEs are still not able to achieve a high degree of ICT automation over the supply chain. One the reason is their inability to recognise the benefits of supply chain automation thus we list an exhaustive list of benefits as they derive from our findings. In addition, seven types of ICT connections used by case companies to support their supply chains were identified and showed that the most of the companies stayed in the lower level of SCM adoption without exploiting the benefits of ICT in full. We support that our results can help organisations and researchers to better understand the ICT adoption for supply chain integration by SMEs in real practice.