ABSTRACT
During the last two decades of the twentieth century, companies became aware that, to survive and ßourish in the marketplace, they needed to expand their business strategies and operations processes beyond the parochial borders of their own individual enterprises to their trading partners out in the supply chain. Emphasis gradually shifted from a long-time concern with managing fairly static internal organization structures, cost and performance measurements, product design and marketing functions, and a localized view of the customer to a realization that new marketplace and technological forces and the accelerating speed of everything, from communications to product life cycles, were driving companies to look beyond their Þrms to their supply chains for sources of competitive advantage. By the end of the 1990s it was widely perceived that only those companies that could effect the collaboration of product resources and value-generating competencies with those of their supply network partners would be able to successfully take advantage of the new global marketplace. The management philosophy that was developed to ßourish in this new economic environment was
supply chain management
(SCM), and it quickly was adopted as the core strategic model for most enterprises.
