Editorial

Manufacturers and organisations of all kinds are re-thinking how they operate as they strive to compete in today’s rapidly changing global, business environment. Increasingly, companies are deciding to join networks and to establish various forms of co-operation in order to gain access to information, skills and capabilities that can be combined and exploited successfully in the marketplace. This trend challenges the traditional models of operations management which tend to focus on individual companies. The concept of Supply Chain Management (SCM) has emerged to indicate a process-oriented, inter-organisational approach to procuring, manufacturing and delivering both products and services. The co-ordination and integration of decision making within such activities has been identified as a main element in cost reduction but customer services are kept and even enhanced, i.e. there is a shift in the classical trade-offs between costs and services. Nowadays, under the pressure of global marketplaces and the impetus and stimulation offered by internet and IT opportunities, the concept of SCM has enriched its content and enlarged its borders, evolving from its role as merely a logistics perspective. SCM is now making itself felt within several inter-organisational business processes, such as customer relationship management, demand management, order fulfilment, product development and commercialisation and so on, and has become a strategic concept and the paradigm of various business models in the emerging web economy.