The necessity of Information Integration in automotive Supply Chains

Similar to other articles I have to repeat some facts about Information Technology. Development of international business , appearance of multinational corporation , growth of international competition , elimination of governmental restrictions on trade , increased customer-focus , rise of customization , explosion of innovation , modular manufacturing and etc.Enterprises in such a complex and hard circumstance have to concentrate on their own abilities and potentials so they prefer to utilize other expert companies to fulfill their goals. So companies are not limited to the boundaries of themselves or even the boundaries of their country. They desire to use the economical, infrastructural or scientific facilities of other firms and countries so subjects like offshoring or outsourcing are getting more popular.Some companies even focus just on their management potentials like design, development, branding, marketing, support, control and so on. They outsource manufacturing to other companies and focus on managing them. So they made the concept of fabless company and fabless manufacturing.In this environment, the scope of supply chain is extended considerably that each member type of supply chain includes a great deal of independent companies. So supply chain management become a very complex and challenging subject.On the other side, new concepts like agile [9] and lean thinking [2] are also getting importance in management and consequently in supply chain management. These methods are cruel to conventional rules of management. They just remove Mooda anywhere and anytime they apply! [2] So we cannot restrict our mind to the old hierarchy and even defined functions of supply chain members. As an instance, there may be warehouses that don’t stock received goods and they just transfer goods from one truck to the other or even package or assemble parts of the products!Organizations face challenges like selecting pull-base, push-base or push-pull supply chains [12], managing orders to supply chain members based on forecasts of members, environment analysis or risk management for members, deciding about the degree of cooperation with members and so on.All mentioned issues are dealing with information and information is the vital necessity of any supply chain competing in today competitive environment. Each member gathers and uses information but disparate information would not lead to the most efficient decisions. In order to reach to optimum decisions whole information gathered by members is required.In this article integrated information requirements of automotive supply chains and the benefits of such information flow is discussed.