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.