Purpose – The paper's purpose is to provide a motivation for investigating the relationship between supply chain management (SCM) and information and communication technology (ICT), to describe associated theoretical and practical problems and to introduce the papers of the special issue....

Purpose – Buyer‐focused operations aim at a high level of supply chain alignment by singling out resources for one buyer in order to serve this buyer optimally. The purpose of this paper is to identify what business characteristics make suppliers choose buyer‐focused operations as a supply...

Purpose – The concept of buyer focus has recently been introduced as a new supply chain strategy, although the design and operation of buyer‐focused cells have hardly been investigated. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how buyer‐focused cells realise responsiveness....

Purpose – The objective of this paper is to gain a better understanding of the impact of context on the adoption of e‐commerce in supply chains. Design/methodology/approach – A literature review, 45 semi‐structured interviews in four different supply chains in the UK healthcare sector,...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to analyse the extent of the integration between manufacturers and third party logistics (TPL) providers at present and how the integration is expected to develop in the near future. The focus is on studying what tasks are part of the cooperation, what...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review and classify survey‐based research connecting information and communication technology (ICT), supply chain management (SCM), and supply chain (SC) performance. The review evaluates present empirical results and aims at detecting explanations...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of supply chain integration in different contexts. More specifically, it aims to show that supply chain integration is only effective in buyer‐supplier relationships characterised by high supply complexity....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of different dimensions of supply chain integration on performance, while considering both the interconnections between these supply chain integration dimensions and the effect of context. Specifically, the authors investigate...