The Relationships between Supply Chain Integration and Product Quality

Information sharing is an essential tool or enabler for supply chain integration. Many researches have been done to investigate the effectiveness of information sharing in supply chain firms. Product quality is one important dimension of operational performance in supply chain management that seeks more attention from the community of researchers. Therefore consideration must be given to the development of collaborative activities between manufacturer, supplier and costumer which enables firms to work together and improves in the product quality. So, studies which examine the effect of seamless supply chain on the product quality remain a research opportunity. This research after an overview on supply chain integration and product quality offers an integrated conceptual framework to examine the interaction of internal and external integration on product quality. The purpose of the study was to find out the related internal integration, customer integration and supplier integration effects on conformance quality and design quality on the manufacturing sector. It also aimed to propose an integrated conceptual framework between supply chain integration and product quality with the presentation of six hypotheses. The proposed conceptual model gives an application of the tools suitable for integration between firms and product quality. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.