Accessing information sharing and information quality in supply chain management

This paper empirically examines the impact of environmental uncertainty, intra-organizational facilitators, and interorganizational relationships on information sharing and information quality in supply chain management. Based on the data collected from 196 organizations, multiple regression analyses are used to test the factor impacting information sharing and information quality respectively. It is found that both information sharing and information quality are influenced positively by trust in supply chain partners and shared vision between supply chain partners, but negatively by supplier uncertainty. Top management has a positive impact on information sharing but has no impact on information quality. The results also show that information sharing and information quality are not impacted by customer uncertainty, technology uncertainty, commitment of supply chain partners, and IT enablers. Moreover, a discriminant analysis reveals that supplier uncertainty, shared vision between supply chain partners and commitment of supply chain partners are the three most important factors in discriminating between the organizations with high levels of information sharing and information quality and those with low levels of information sharing and information quality. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.