Identification of requirements towards a business information tool

Abstract

Many companies act in fast developing markets, characterized by a strong global competition and rapidly changing production structures. Continuous development of advanced technologies leads to frequent product changes and to short production runs. Collaboration across the supply chain is one possibility to face these challenges and to stay competitive. Effective collaboration requires an intensive information exchange between supply chain partners. Currently, there are several concepts and tools, automating information exchanges on the operational level. However, collaboration and thus the corresponding information exchange support on the tactical and strategic levels have been neglected so far. The CONVERGE project aims to fill this gap. It develops a framework and tools for exchanging tactical and strategic information between equally powered supply chain partners. This contribution describes the results of a problem analysis, conducted to determine requirements on a suitable business information tool. Several requirements, towards the information exchange itself were identified. Furthermore, the article describes characteristics and deduced profiles, which aim to support the identification of a collaboration's particular requirements. These characteristics cover a company's need for information exchange, security and confidentiality as well as its supply chain stability. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.