
Figure 7.1 depicts the difference between the conventional supply chain with lim-
ited transfer of information and the synchronous supply chain with network-wide
visibility and transparency.
The extended enterprise and the virtual supply
chain
The nature of business enterprise is changing. Today’s business is increasingly
‘boundaryless’, meaning that internal functional barriers are being eroded in favour
of horizontal process management and externally the separation between vendors,
distributors, customers and the firm is gradually lessening. This is the idea of the
extended enterprise, which is transforming our thinking on how organisations ...