Since its introduction by management consultants in the early 1980s, supply chain management (SCM) has been primarily concerned with the integration of processes and activities both within and between organisations. The concept of supply chain integration (SCI) is based on documented evidence that suggests that much of the waste throughout businesses is a consequence of fragmented supply chain ...

Supply chain management represents a critical competency in today’s global business environment, but neither commerce through EDI technology nor current Web applications satisfy combined requirements of process integration and flexibility. The present research builds on prior agent work to argue multi-agent systems offer tremendous potential and capability to overcome such limitations. The pape...

The efficacy, quality, responsiveness, and value of healthcare services provided is increasingly attracting the attention and the questioning of governments, payers, patients, and healthcare providers. Investments on integration technologies and integration of supply chain processes, has been considered as a way towards removing inefficiencies in the sector. This chapter aims to initially provi...

One of the most significant changes in organizational business models has been that it is not the individual organizations that compete with each other; rather they compete as a network of organizations forming the supply chain. To compete as supply chains in a digital economy organizations invest in digital applications, and IT infrastructure for supply chain integration. They also establish l...

The supply chain management (SCM) consists of the integration of the business logistics management processes involving not only units within an enterprise but also across units belonging to both upstream and downstream partners, such as suppliers, customers, and logistics service providers. According to the council of logistics management (CLM, 1999), the set of activities to be managed include...

This paper develops an analytical model that explores how important supply chain parameters affect the cost savings to be realized from collaborative initiatives such as vendor-managed inventory (VMI). Results from the model show that benefits, in the form of inventory cost reductions, may be generated from integration depending upon the ratio of the order costs of the supplier to the buyer and...

Electronic business has a strong influence on the relationships between partners within supply chains. Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) need an affordable, integrated set of software tools to support integration of their supply chains and to take advantage of the new ways of doing business in the electronic business environment. The paper reviews evolution and current trends in supply ...

While inter-firm collaboration and integration remain critical for supply chain performance and information technology (IT) has been playing an increasingly important role in inter-firm cooperation, whether intra-firm IT skills can impact the inter-firm integration of IT has not been explored in the IS area. IT human capital involving soft skills and hard skills is a relatively unexplored topic...

In this paper, ontology technology is applied to Supply Chain information integration, in order to provide unified interface for semantic data and to share, reuse knowledge among information resources. Ontology can solve well the semantic heterogeneity problem of distributed, heterogeneous and autonomous data sources; and the problem of semantic interoperability. Since the objects on Supply Cha...

Integrating these services should improve the overall care an individual receives at a facility. As health care facilities increasingly offer integrated health care packages, all the products required for provision of these services need to be available. Historically, this has contributed to an understanding of integration as putting all products together on one truck. However, integration is n...