Difficulties in Implementing the Agile Supply Chain: Lessons Learned from Interorganizational Information Systems Adoption

Agility is becoming an important component in the continuous struggle to increase overall supply chain performance. The need to react speedily to sudden changes in demand or supply necessitates the sharing of a large amount of high quality information in a timely manner between trading partners. Electronic data interchange (EDI) and other interorganizational systems (IOS) are able to support these goals; however, the diffusion of these systems throughout the supply chain is by no means guaranteed. We borrow from the IOS adoption literature to explain reasons of failure to adopt. We use the adoption position model to analyze three short case studies and we corroborate that, in these cases, the relative power of a firm and its intent of adoption toward a specific IOS together determine its position in the decision. By combining the adoption positions of the trading partners, we can effectively predict the decision of the outcome. At the end of the paper, we propose strategies to overcome these barriers which hinder the realization of an agile supply chain.