An empirical model of collaboration degree of management information system in supply chain: A case study

In time of cooperation, Supply chain becomes a prevailing managerial concept to many companies. Well operated supply chains rely on intense information sharing and call for powerful collaborative management information system to support day to day running. On the other side, investment into information infrastructure means a large amount of money which may not secure financial proceeds. Our research starts from the hypothesis that if the decision maker knew the relationship between collaboration degree and the corresponsive gain, no matter financial or managerial, lie or she could make the best choice. To prove the hypothesis, we need two tools: first, a quantitative or qualitative model which represent the relationship we mentioned above; second, a tool to describe the "collaboration degree of MIS", which is a precondition to find the former relationship. This paper focuses on the second objective that is to establish an evaluation model of Collaboration degree. It is based on the mid-term result of a 2-year field research of two closely linked supply chain member in Wuhan, China. By the case study, we identified two levels of factors to evaluate the collaboration status, which we called collaboration. degree of MIS. The first level is composed of reliability, adaptability and technology; and accuracy, error correctness, flexibility, structure, data exchange, and security are included in the second level. A simple mathematic model is presented by the end of this paper.