At its core, supply chain management (SCM) enables a company to get the right goods and services to the place they’re needed at the right time, in the right amount, and at a profitable cost. Efficient management of the process includes monitoring relationships with a variety of stakeholders in the supply chain, including suppliers and customers, and overseeing inventory, forecasting and feedback. There are four components of the supply chain: location, production, inventory, and transportation. There are also three flows or pathways in the process: product flow, information flow, and financial flow. Traditionally there have been separate plans for each of these pathways and for monitoring these relationships for each component of the supply chain. However, today’s electronic, E-Commerce, and Internet marketplace creates the need for new models of supply chain management that are wholly integrated. Driving the erosion of traditional models is the nature of electronic consumer-direct models of doing business. As Hintlian and Mann maintain, “The problem is that consumer direct models are putting high demands on the distribution system as a result of smaller, more frequent, more time-sensitive orders to an often significantly broadened geographic base” (2).
Evolving business models of supply chain management begin at home. Before companies are able to take advantage of leveraging integrated supply chain management externally, they must integrate it internally. Four developments that have evolved as companies change their business models to incorporate integrated supply chain management in order to add value to products and services are: e-marketplaces, collaborative manufacturing, integrated fulfillment, and design for supply chain by supply chains (Anderson and Lee 2). Benetton’s wholly integrated supply chain, including collaborative manufacturing, integrated fulfillment, and e-mark
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