The roles of information technology in supply chain management

The use of information technology (IT) is considered a prerequisite for the effective control of today's complex supply chains. Despite the acknowledged importance of the use of IT in supply chain management (SCM), the number of empirical studies assessing the use of IT in the supply chain context is limited. Based on empirical data from 16 Finnish industrial and service companies this paper presents a classification of the ways in which companies use IT in SCM, and examines the drivers for these different utilization types. According to the findings of this research, the use of IT for SCM purposes can be divided into 1) transaction processing, 2) supply chain planning and collaboration, and 3) order tracking and delivery coordination. The findings further suggest that the drivers between these three uses of IT in SCM differ.