How to survive and develop in this hyper competitive environment has become a major concern for many companies. To deal with the increasing uncertainty, manufacturers need to respond the customer demands quickly. But manufacturers can not improve supply chain responsiveness by themselves, they need external resources, supply chain partners' information is one of them. Thus, sharing information with supply chain partners becomes important. However, information sharing along is not enough and manufacturers also need to integrate their internal processes to fully utilize the external resources. On the other hand, information sharing will increase interdependence between focal company and its environment. Resource dependence theory argues that this interdependence will bring power to the external roles and organizations' decisions will be constrained by those external roles. So, we propose that the impacts of external information sharing on process integration will be affected by supplier/customer use of power. Based on a sample of 571 Chinese manufacturers, we find that information sharing within supply chain is positively related to internal process integration and this relationship is moderated by supplier/customer use of non-mediated power but not mediated power.
[...] Frohlich, 2002; Power and Singh, 2007; Sahin and Robinson, 2005; Srinivasan et al., 1994). However, this is not always the case. Kulp et al. (2004) point out information sharing is a necessary but not sufficient for manufacturers to gain superior performance, without appropriate business processes for the utilization of information, information sharing can only lead to an overload of information and sharply limited value (Clark et al., 2001). Business processes need to be integrated to reduce delivery times. So, cross-functional process integration is a mediator between information sharing and supply chain responsiveness. [...]
[...] Based on RDT, we propose that information sharing will increase interdependence and this will affect manufacturers' decision about integration, that is, process integration and its ability to deal with uncertainties, that is, responsiveness of supply chain. From this perspective, we hypothesize that supply chain information sharing positively relates to the process integration and this relation is moderated by the supplier/customer use of power and the impact of information sharing on supply chain responsiveness is mediated by the degree of process integration. All hypotheses are supported by a sample of 571 Chinese manufacturers. References [1]Aldrich, H.E., and Pfeffer, J Environments of organizations, Annual Review of Sociology, Vol.2, pp. 79---105 [2]Baron, R. M. and Kenny, D. [...]
[...] 1223---1247 Ketchen, D.J., and Hult, G.T.M, 2007a, Toward great integration from organization theory and supply chain management, Journal of Operations Management, Vol.25, pp. 455---458 Ketchen, D.J., and Hult, G.T.M, 2007b, Bridging organization theory and supply chain management: The case of best value supply chains, Journal of Operations Management, Vol.25, pp. 573---580 Kim, K.K., and Umanath, N.S Information transfer in B2B procurement: An empirical analysis and measurement, Information and Management, Vol.42, pp.813---828 Kobayashi, T., Tamaki, M., Komoda, N Business process integration as a solution to the implementation of supply chain management system, Information & Management, Vol.40, pp. [...]
[...] So, we propose that manufacturers' information sharing with supply chain partners and process integration decision are all positively related to the responsiveness to customers. Figure 1 shows the research framework of this paper. Informatio n Sharing with S li Powe Process Integration Powe Responsivenes s Informatio n Sharing with C Figure 1 Research Framework Business process integration has two characteristics: design processes for real-time information sharing and integrate several systems to manage their exercise (Kobayashi et al., 2003). Information sharing is the foundation of supply chain integration (Lee, 2000), and it forms the backbone of any business process integration (Becker et al., 2003; Kim and Umanath, 2005). [...]
[...] 769---780 Kulp, S.C., Lee, H.L., and Ofek, E Manufacturing benefits from information integration with retail customers, Management Science, Vol.50, No.4, pp.431---444 Lee, H.L Creating value through supply chain integration, Supply Chain Review, September/October 2000 Maloni, M. Benton, W.C Power influences in the supply chain. Journal of Business Logistics 49-73. Miles, R.E., and Snow, C.C Organization theory and supply chain management: An evolving research perspective, Journal of Operations Management, Vol pp.459---463 Morash, E.A. and Clinton, S. R “Supply chain integration: customer value through collaborative closeness versus operational excellence.” Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, 104-20. [...]
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