In reality, only few firms have fully integrated entire supply chain activities despite the enormous potential benefits that could be resulted from higher integration level (Mentzer et al., 2001; Sohal et al., 2003; Sahay and Ramneesh, 2003).
Findings of Fawcett and Magnan (2002) discovered that about 47% of the surveyed companies are working towards integration of business processes within the company meanwhile about 34% of them are integrating with first-tier suppliers and 11% of them are integrating with key customers. Surprisingly, only 8% of them are systematically integrating supply chain activities among key customers and suppliers where there are practically no companies which fully integrate supply chain activities either with their supplier’s suppliers or with customer’s customers.