Supply Chains: A Manager's Guide

Internet-Based Systems

The biggest change taking place in supply chain software today is the move to the Internet. The Internet does not, as was widely believed at the end of the last century, lead to a fundamentally different economy, nor does it alter the basic dynamics of supply chains. Physical goods still have to get from place to place, and the Internet doesn't alleviate the need to choreograph that movement as precisely as possible. What the Internet does do is provide a vastly improved communications medium for coordinating this movement of goods. Like the telegraph, the telephone, and the fax machine before it, the primary impact of the Internet is on the speed, and not the nature, of business processes. As with these earlier technologies, ...