Supply chain management (SCM) is the 21st century global operations strategy for achieving organizational competitiveness. Companies are attempting to find ways to improve their flexibility and responsiveness and in turn competitiveness by changing their operations strategy, methods and technologies that include the implementation of SCM paradigm and information technology (IT) (A.
Gunasekaran, E.W.T. Ngai 2003).
The industries in the 21st century are trying to improve their infrastructure in order to compete in the global market. The industries are adopting agile methods for the sake of fulfilment of market requirements. For achieving market goals industries are moving towards outsourcing virtual enterprises and resulting in the decentralization of their activities for getting maximum market benefits. So there is the need of a bridge, which may serve as an integrator between suppliers and partnering firms, in the domains of supply chains or logistics. The bridge which can fill the gap, between suppliers and partnering firms, is the domain of Information Technology. The integration of suppliers and partnering firms through Information Technology evolved the new approach known as Supply Chain Management.
Supply Chain Management Systems or logistic systems are present everywhere and they are adopted by many industry champions or network leaders. In the beginning the interorganizational systems used by the industries were only able to support the automation of manual processes such as for managing orders and accounts. Then with the passage of time the addition of different powerful features, like information sharing, communication and collaboration, in the existing systems have made them more robust and beneficial for network leaders (Icasati – Johanson and Fleck 2003).