A Literature Review on Supply Chain Integration and Performance of Manufacturing Firms

Integration of businesses, technology, people and processes within the enterprise and across extended enterprises has become a necessity to succeed in this competitive economy. Supply chain management system facilitates inter-enterprise cooperation and collaboration with suppliers, customers and business partners. This integrated system can bring benefits and competitive advantages to the organizations.

This study reviews a sample of the literature related to supply chain integration (SCI). The literature review method is used to evaluate the empirical research published from 2007 to 2012. The findings of previous studies are sumarised to form reference for further empirical research. The study notifies that internal integration forms a basis for establishing external integration. Review of literature substantiate that supplier integration has a positive effect on performance and customer integration has contradicting effect. While researchers have made significant progress in our understanding of SCI, there is an extensive need for more work to provide in-depth insights into the potential of SCI. The major contributions of this study are, it expands the present understanding of benefits and considerations in implementing integration within and across enterprises. And also evaluate the empirical works and provide opportunity for researchers to explore it further. Limitation of the study includes, literature being reviewed from only top ranked journals and determinants of supply chain integration are not focused.