Shrinking Supply Chains of Information

Abstract

The development of Internet has revolutionaized the businesses across the globe by streamlining their supply chain, thereby achieving substantial cost reduction. The concept of "agile & lean manufacturing", which brought in radical changes in manufacturing systems all over the world has its bearing on the development of open standards and efficient networking across the coporate houses. In this paper , we look how the learning from manufacturing sector could be translated into the "information industry", so as to develop libraries for the next millennium. We develop the supply chain of information extending right from the point of origin to the point of use, thereby identifying the non-value adding delays in the process. The model is illustrated, without loss of generality, through the example of a journal publication. The paper brings out a decision model for effective deployment of technology for minimising these delays. The variuos stumbling blocks in this re-engineering exercise al...