Supply chain integration in relation to manufacturing industries

Manufacturers have been exploring innovative strategies to achieve and sustain their competitive advantages by facing a new era of intensive global competition. Such a strategy is supply chain management (SCM), which has gained a tremendous amount of attention from both researchers and practitioners since the last decade. Supply chain management (SCM) has been considered as the most popular operations strategy for improving organizational competitiveness in the twenty-first century. It has attracted a lot of attention due to its role involving all of the activities in industrial organizations ranging from raw material procurement to final product delivery to customers. Well-designed supply chain systems can substantially improve efficiency and product quality, and eventually enhance customer satisfaction and profitability. In this paper, a manufacturing engineering perspective on supply chain integration is presented. Research issues discussed include product and process design for supply chain, design valuation of manufacturing supply chain, agent-based techniques for supply chain integration, intelligent information sharing across supply chain, and development of standards for product, process, and production data exchange to facilitate electronic commerce. The objective is to provide guidelines and references for manufacturing engineers and researchers that are interested in supply chain integration.