| dc.description.abstract | In order to gain the sustained competitive advantage in this more and more dynamic business environment, collaboration between supply chain members is critical to success. With the development of internet, the business boundaries between supply chain members could be broken and form the extended supply chain. i-Hub, the driver of centralized planning scenario, will be critical mechanism to enable the new collaboration environment. And how do i-Hub and its centralized planning function influence business is our focus.
In this thesis, we first review the relative literatures about extended supply chain, collaboration, virtual enterprise and inter-organizational relationships. Next, we propose the supply chain and extended supply chain ontology to clarify the relationships among entities in the supply chain network. After that, the infrastructure of i-Hub is identified. Based on these fundamental concept developments, we can dig into the influence of i-Hub to business. We take two perspectives to check these influence made by i-Hub. First is the influence happening among supply chain members, we propose the “collaboration mode” to identify these relationships driven by i-Hub. Second, the influence happening within business planning activities, we divide the internal planning activities into several modules and find that there are two influences, “extraction” and “control/monitor”, to different planning activities respectively.
This research could be the fundamental basis for researches which take the i-Hub, centralized planning, and extended supply chain as assumption and environment. And this thesis also sketches the contours of various further research topics. | en_US |