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High technology is an important factor for companies to consider when gathering ideas for customer opportunities; increase the company’s capability to compete, and so that they can reach long term development goals. Internet technology can be categorised as shown below (Tjader, 2004):
1. E-commerce information arranges for customers to purchase products and services by the company’s website.
2. Information delivery and data exchange – so that collaboration between companies becomes clearer, to understand customer needs, and to provide the manufacturing, transportation, and sales information required.
3. The Internet is a highly integrated communication tool for customers, suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and other key alliance partners.
4. With the purpose of complete SCM to make sure everything functions efficiently, frequent information systems have been developed to support SCM. In the earliest information systems, SCM primarily supported individual functions, such as the purchasing departments.
Since there was not much inter-organisational coordination between the departments in a company or with suppliers and customers, the systems could be developed to match internal departmental processing requirements. Inter-organisational coordination was accomplished by some early adopters with the use of EDI systems (Thompson, 1967).
As harmonisation in the supply chain became more important from the 1980s and the term “Supply Chain Management” was invented, the systems evolved to reflect the capability of the technology in SCM. Only recently have companies turned to the integration of CRM systems with SCM systems, in order to be agile for customer contributions. On the other hand, customers are able to be served, listened to and valued, even though they can’t always be controlled. At the same time as relationships with customers being managed, customer need may not always be controllable. What may be controllable is the flexibility of the network to adjust to changing needs. The information systems that have been developed to judge customer demand are the CRM systems.
Furthermore, SCM systems are focused on reducing costs but CRM systems are focused on enhancing revenue. The missing link between supply and demand systems can lead to an excess inventory, additional costs, and unsatisfied customers. The focus of information systems to support efforts in the customer fulfilment process should centre on value, not supply, as organisations need to focus on networks, not linear chains of flows. Information has become the key driver of any advantage, so information systems have evolved to link supply and demand in a networked fashion, enabling companies to link customer demand directly to their network supply chains. Information technology will soon no longer be an obstruction to the flow of networked information through the linking of the supply and demand information. To integrate an organisation and technology is relevant for information technology, as organisations will believe in their financial consignment and benefits of such electronic inter-organisational systems when they are integrated into their e-commerce relationships and delivery mechanisms (Sarkis,et al., 2004).