Lean and Technology: Working Hand in Hand to Enable and Energize Your Global Supply Chain

19. Collaborative Supply Chain Systems

By integrating and collaborating with partners and customers downstream as part of a Lean strategy for your supply chain, you actually open a window into your future—and even your past. It’s like having the ability to time travel. Before we travel through time, however, let’s look at the subtle differences between integration and collaboration.

Integration of supply chain components started in the 1970s, when electronic data interchange (EDI) created a business-to-business communications standard, followed in the 1990s by enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems with common databases. Then came the introduction and growth of the Internet.

However, true supply chain collaboration is more than just integrating ...