Advances in Information Technologies have transformed the way organisations interact with each other, and with their customers. Customers and organisations have become more demanding, desiring customised products and services that are made to their precise needs, at comparatively lower costs, and within time-compressed environments. Organisations have accepted and recognised that in the dynamic modern day business environment, knowledge is the prime resource for providing an organisation with a sustainable competitive advantage. Consequently, to enable organisations to respond to this dynamic environment, new management paradigms such as Knowledge Management (KM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) have evolved.
This text presents both theoretical and empirical research into the value of KM in SCM, and how supply chain partners can use Information Technologies (IT) to improve organizational performance and gain strategic advantage in market-driven supply chains. It discusses the impact of information technology on SCM and in particular offers insights' on how the synergistic interaction between advances in the internet, database technologies and GPS technologies has led to the emergence of web-based multimedia SCM systems. Finally, this text concludes with a summary of how advances in IT are likely to have an impact on SCM in the future.
