Industry-Wide Supply Chain Information Integration: The Lack of Management and Disjoint Economic Responsibility

Experiences from enterprise-wide integration initiatives during more than four decades indicate that industry-wide information integration could render substantial benefits. Two ways in which industry-wide integration differs from enterprise-wide integration are that there is no common management level and the economic units in the integration are the constituent units, not the industry. Management involvement has been emphasized as perhaps the most critical success factor for enterprise-wide information integration. The common economic unit enables increased costs in one part of the organization to lower the total cost in the company as a whole. In this article the authors address which consequence these two differences have for the development of information integration in four industry-wide supply chains. The authors find the existing methods for enterprise-wide information integration, such as BPR, virtually impossible to apply on industrywide information integration and that the disjoint economic responsibility is a hampering aspect in reaching potential benefits of industry-wide information integration.