Coordination of Supply Chain Systems: From the Perspective of Information Flow

The supply chain plays an essential role for modern companies to retain their competitive advantages in today´s business environments. As supply chain members are often separate and independent economic entities, a key issue in supply chain management is to develop mechanisms that can align their objectives and coordinate their activities so as to optimize system performance. Information is a keyword in the coordination. In this paper, we provide a review of coordination of operational information in supply chain which is classified into information types, their impact on supply chain performance, and the policy of information sharing. Then the essentials for information coordination are indicated. In the end, future research direction is pointed out.