Introduction

In recent years, supply chain management has attracted increased attention and interest in the field of business logistics. For researchers, the optimization of the supply chain is a major task. In practice, different approaches have been developed to establish an efficient supply chain between companies, such as, e.g., Efficient Consumer Response (ECR). Moreover, recent standard Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) packages consider the entire supply chain starting with the suppliers' suppliers and ending with the customers' customers. It is crucial that material and information flows are coordinated in order to achieve the overall efficiency of a supply chain.