The Need for an Electronic Document Exchange Infrastructure for Supply Chain Management

Abstract

Established supply chain management techniques such Just-In-Time inventory (JIT), Quick Response (QR) and Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) have proven that re-organising a business' processes to take advantage of the characteristics of electronic information exchange can yield significant results. IT support for these approaches is critical, and has traditionally focused on the exchange of standardised business documents. As the internet and other proprietary and organisational networks expand, however, organisations are now seizing the opportunity to use this enabling infrastructure to exchange other, more varied, types of information. With this proliferation of document exchange types and mechanisms comes the need for a supporting technological infrastructure, which will facilitate the rapid development of systems which support these supply chain management and business process reengineering initiatives. This paper contains a descriptive exploratory case of a large Australian organisation, which has undergone the process of developing an electronic document exchange (EDE) strategy for supply chain management across all its divisions. We present an initial requirements framework for EDE derived from this case study, covering success and failure constraints, as well as business and functional criteria. The importance of internal application standards is addressed.