Supply chain integration: State-of-the-art, trends and challenges

ABSTRACT: This paper discusses different ways of obtaining more or less integrated supply chain solutions in terms of collaboration incentives and applications. The state-of-the-art, the expected future state and the challenges are discussed for the industrial business applications used at present. The paper concludes that the shift from a function-oriented view to a flow-oriented view is a significant challenge regarding industrial applications and company organisation. Further, the specialised systems managing, for example, product lifecycles and vendor inventories, are expected to merge into the large Enterprise Resource Planning applications within the coming years.