ABSTRACT
Companies have always known that leveraging the strengths of business partners could compensate for their own operational deficiencies, thereby enabling them to expand their marketplace footprint without expanding their costs. Still, there were limits to how robust these alliances could be due to their resistance to share market and product data, limitations in communication mechanisms, and inability to network the many independent channel nodes that constituted their business channels. In addition, companies were often reluctant to form closer dependences for fear of losing leverage when it came to working and negotiating with channel players. SCM is important because companies have come to recognize that their capacity to continuously reinvent competitive advantage depends less on internal capabilities and more on their ability to look outward to the networks of business partners in search of the resources to assemble the right blend of competencies that will resonate with their own organizations and core product and process strategies.
