Dimension 6

Supply Chain Integration

Supply chain integration is about making processes seemless across organizational boundaries. This is in line with the networked world of the 21st Century. Usually, other organizations, many of them external, will participate in projects and impact project success.

The following general aspects can be used to evaluate high-level aspects of supply chain integration with suppliers and customers. Their focus is on the supply side.

Contractor Integration as Resources
Human resources that are not formally employed by the project owner are contractors. While they may be managed as internal resources, their reporting of actual time spent, their qualification, and their compensation is likely to differ from employees. Often, the key business relationship is with organizations providing individual resources under their management responsibility.

Material Supplier Integration
The availability of non-human resources like materials and equipment can impact the project schedule, the quality of its deliverables, and its costs.

Outsourcing of Sub-Projects and Project Deliverables
Often in complex enterprise projects, key deliverables (or WBS elements or sub-projects) will be taken care of in the responsibility of external entities. Such outsourcing or turnkey contracting will need to be integrated into the big picture of a project, up to the point of cost and progress control, quality control, and risk management.

A more specific analysis of supply chain integration capabilities of an organization will need to look at automated integration, but also at special functional circumstances like partnering (and collaboration) up to joint venture management, and the handling of sales and delivery of products and services. The latter case is the "flip side" of the above mentioned outsourcing of projects or sub-projects.

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