دیدگاه های احتمالی همکاری الکترونیکی و عملکرد در ساخت

Manufacturers are increasingly utilizing Internet-based tools to more readily conduct collaborative activities with key business customers. While the emerging conventional wisdom suggests that the greater the extent to which manufacturers engage in Internet-enabled commerce with downstream business customers the better the performance, we espouse an alternative view. Consistent with the relational view of competitive advantage and contingency theory, we develop a model and a series of hypotheses that specify how various product and market characteristics may influence the nature of the expected positive relationship between e-collaboration and performance.

In recent years, the practitioner and academic literatures have generated much excitement about Internet-enabled commerce, or the use of the Internet to conduct or support business activities across the supply chain (Boyer and Olson, 2002, Mullaney et al., 2003, Rosenzweig et al., 2009, Tsikriktsis et al., 2004, Zhu and Kraemer, 2002 and Zhu and Kraemer, 2005). One form of Internet-enabled commerce—e-collaboration, which “facilitates coordination of various decisions and activities beyond transactions among the supply chain partners…over the Internet” (Johnson and Whang, 2002, 414)—has garnered a great deal of attention. Frohlich and Westbrook (2002, 741), for example, conclude that

Much of the extant literature touts the increasing importance of investing in integrated processes and technologies with supply chain partners. We know from the supply chain management literature that a failure to collaborate with partners often leads to distorted information flows, which in turn result in ineffective production, capacity, and transportation scheduling/planning; excess inventory and/or stockouts; and loss of revenues and customers (Corbett et al., 1999 and Lee et al., 1997). Along these lines, Rayport and Jaworski (2004, 58) assert that “as the focus of competition shifts from what companies do to how they do it, the new frontier of competitive advantage lies in the quality of interactions and relationships companies can establish with their customers and markets.”