Enabling the benefits of Supply Chain Management Systems: an empirical study of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) in manufacturing

Although informative, the literature related to Supply Chain Management Systems (SCMS) needs to be developed further to provide insight related to the realized benefits of adopting firms. Specifically, there is a need to analyse empirically and systematically the potential benefits and variables that explain the differences in benefit variation. To contribute to this need, the study analysed SCMS benefits in four steps. First, drawing from survey responses of a diverse group of manufacturing plants, the study sought evidence of the claimed benefits found in the literature. Second, the study built on the claims and findings of previous researchers to formulate and test hypotheses related to factors that help explain differences in benefits. Third, once the explanatory variables were analysed in isolation, they were then analysed for the incremental effects. Finally, based on the results of the first three steps, the study refined the results to produce a synthesized explanatory SCMS benefit model.