Collaboration: the key to value creation in supply chain management

As global markets grow increasingly efficient, competition no longer takes place between individual businesses, but between entire value chains. Collaboration through intelligent e‐business networks will provide the competitive edge that enables all the participants in a value chain to prevail and grow. Collaboration requires individual participants to adopt simplified, standardized solutions based on common architectures and data models. Time to market is critical, and participants will have to forego the luxuries of customization and modification that characterized the proprietary infrastructures of the past.