No abstract

Purpose -Though there is a wide acceptance of the strategic importance of integrating operations with suppliers and customers in the supply chain, many questions remain unanswered about how best to characterize supply chain strategies. Is it more important to link with suppliers, customers, or both? Similarly, little is known about the connections between supplier and customer integration and improved operations performance. This article seeks to investigate supplier and customer integration strategies by comparing US and East Asian companies. It is of paramount interest to find out how these strategies actually differ and affect performance of the companies. Design/methodology/approach -This was carried out in three phases. In the first phase, a number of operations-management related journals were skimmed to select about 30 research articles related to supply chain concepts and practices. In the second phase, investigation efforts narrowed down to supply chain management research conducted in East Asia and the USA. In the third phase, comparisons were made between East Asian and US companies' indicators of supply chain integration and performance. Findings -The need to react to market changes and the critical role of the supply chain in meeting this need, and the potential benefits of integrating the supply chain, can no longer be ignored. This potential, however, will be realized only if the interrelationships among different parts of the supply chain are recognized, and proper alignment is ensured between the design and execution of the company's competitive strategy. Practical implications -The implications for article findings on future research and practice in the new millennium are considered. Originality/value -The aim is to recommend these findings to companies which are still at the infancy stage when it comes to supply chain management and integration with customers and suppliers.

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The literature on supply chain and information has grown consistently over the past few years. This scenario reflects that that academics and practitioners have realized that in order for firms to become flexible, adaptable and efficient, they must focus their resources on managing the information throughout the supply chain channel. On the other hand, the competitive global marketplace requires firms to be flexible, for example they need to be able to share the information so that they can deliver materials with rapid cycle, or driving towards operational excellence. Although information sharing among trading partners is consistently mentioned as a key requirement of effectiveness supply chain management, research on information sharing is scarce particularly in Malaysian cases. This lack of research provides little guidance and support for those managers interested in improving their information sharing with the suppliers and customers. The main aim of this paper is to identify what are the factors influencing the effectiveness of operational information sharing. Questionnaires were sent to supply chain managers at E&E firms in several industries in Malaysia. Five independent variables namely, information quality, IT commitment, SCM commitment, organizational size and trust were significantly related to operational information sharing. This finding indicates that it is extremely important to consider the quality of the information and the ability of the recipients to utilize the information based on differences in technologies being used, apart from their commitment on SCM, size of their organizations and trust among the partners. With the critical role that operational information plays in increasing the collaboration among supply chain partners, these factors are believed can facilitate the effectiveness of operational information sharing by supporting the practitioners to build capabilities to compete globally.

Purpose -The primary purpose of this paper is to examine empirically the significant determinant for supply chain partnering (SCP) that can be applied by the firms to increase their effectiveness in SCP efforts. Next, the paper intends to examine the impact of scalable partnering towards the effectiveness of SCP. Design/methodology/approach -To address the research problem, a survey instrument is developed and a structured model is hypothesized and tested using SPSS tool. Data are collected from a field research on a sample of 584 companies in Malaysia. Findings -The result of this research indicates that resource sharing have positive influences on SCP. Increasing scalable partnering would also lead to increases in the effectiveness of SCP. Research limitations/implications -One of the limitations of the study is that the use of a single key informant for the data collection from the respective companies. A more stringent test of the relationships between scalable partnering and its impact in SCP requires a longitudinal study. Practical implications -Managers must also recognize the influential role of scalable partnering which actually motivates channel partners to continue their investment in SCM initiatives. Thus, managers should pay more attention to the need of channel member to generate a higher level of confidence in scalable partnering. Originality/value -While SCP and its determinant exist in prior research, this paper contributes a new variable "Scalable Partnering" towards strengthening the relationship among the supply chain partners.