Introduction

Abstract

Increasing customer satisfaction requirements concerning products and service, more differentiated customer desires, and international competition, determine new opportunities and requirements for the management of logistics processes. The diversity of customer needs with it’s product variety leads enterprises to develop new strategies like mass customization in order to deal with the organizational complexity and cost increases. Within the area of supply chain management, concepts for the coordination of such systems are developed, discussed, compared, and implemented. The coordination concerns different internal processes as well as the integration of external suppliers and customers and is supported by recent developments in information and communication technology. Within the efficient consumer response (ECR) philosophy, the coordination of logistics processes is mainly directed to customer requests by collecting point-of-sale (POS) information (e.g. with scanner terminals) and by immediate transmission to all involved supply chain processes and partners using electronic data interchange (EDI) technology or even by utilizing the internet. Practical applications derived from the ECR-philosophy are the continuous replenishment process (CRP) and vendor managed inventories (VMI).¹