Preventing failure in IT-enabled systems for supply chain management

Supply chain management (SCM) emphasises the overall and long-term benefit of all parties on the chain through cooperation and information sharing. This signifies the importance of communication and the application of IT-enabled systems in SCM. A supply chain management information system (SCMIS) is usually user-interfaced and designed to provide information and information processing capability to support the strategy, operations, management analysis, and decision-making functions in an organisation's supply network. SCMIS provides high quality, relevant and timely information flow that effectively supports decision-making for inventory replenishment, capacity activation, and for synchronising material flows at all tiers within the supply chain. In recent years, there have been some efforts on designing efficient information systems for supply chain management; but many of them have led to failure. Using a critical failure factor (CFF) approach and based on a perfect study, we investigate this crucial issue in-depth and put forward feasible solutions regarding failure prevention in such systems throughout this article. Three main purposes of this paper are to: (1) identify SCMIS and its characteristics, (2) introduce and categorise the critical failure factors of SCM and SCMIS, and (3) investigate the explanatory power of these CFFs on the performance of supply channel processes performed through SCMIS.