Abstract

In order to survive and beat the competition in today’s competitive world, one has to manage the future. Managing the future means managing information. In order to deliver quality information to the decision-maker at the right time and in order to automate the process of data collection, collation and refinement, organizations have to make Information Technology an ally, harness its full potential and use it in the best possible way. IT is beneficial for cooperation and integration within the stakeholders of the supply chain.

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Today companies are often not considered independent entities, but parts of multi-company,multi-echelon networks, i.e. supply chains, delivering goods and services to the final customer. Supply chain management (SCM) literature proposes that integrated control of these multi-company networks can provide significant benefits. The utilisation of information technology (IT), in turn, is considered an imperative requirement for managing these networks, and has been associated with significant supply chain efficiency improvements .
Although the importance of IT for efficient SCM is widely acknowledged, empirical research assessing how IT is in practice used for the purposes of SCM is narrow. More specifically, majority of the prior research has focused either on modeling the benefits of interorganizational information technologies and information sharing, or on assessing the impact of specific technologies on supply chain efficiency. Consequently, the actual uses of IT in supply chain management as well as the reasons for using IT in a specific way still remain unclear. Due to these identified limitations in the previous literature we address the following research problem: “How and for what purposes do companies use information technology in supply chain management?”
The paper is structured as follows. First,