Enhancing partner relationships

When a firm decides it must move into Level 3, termed enhancing partner relationships, the focus moves to such matters as supplier synchronization to make sure planning systems involve the key suppliers mentioned. The idea is to make certain these suppliers are bringing the right materials forward to meet actual production needs. The current use of demonstrated best supply chain practices is considered, regardless of the industry from which these practices derived. Suppliers manage inventories through VMI systems and replenishment is based on information... 

Enabling fundamental productivity improvements for customers, key business partners, and employees to enhance the desired relationships... 

Third, in investigating lOS use to facilitate supply chain collaboration, prior studies focus on lOS enabled relationship-specific process integration between partners (Venkatraman and Zaheer 1990 Lee et al. 1997 Hart and Saunders 1998 Lambert et al. 2004 Saeed et al. 2005). Other roles of lOS, such as lOS use for communication to enhance supply chain partners collaborative communication and lOS use for intelligence to improve supply chain partners joint knowledge creation, have been largely unexplored in extant literature. 

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