The Survey of the Collaborative Commerce Implementation in Taiwan

With the changing of public consumer habits, product replacement speed has accelerated and often results in manufacturers with large amounts of inventory. In addition, under the impact of the bullwhip effect, the higher in the supply chain this phenomenon reaches, the greater the fluctuations in orders. This often leads to a serious build up of inventory and waste of material. In such cases, to be able to grasp the information from the demand-side as a reference for operational planning has become the key factor for enterprises to profit. In order to solve the difficult situation of the overly high inventory cost dragging down the operational efficiency, the CPFR (Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment), presented by VICS in 2002, has been introduced into many enterprises. It is expected to increase the accuracy of predicting the product sales through the collaboration of the demand-side and supply-side to process effective procurement to reduce the inventory cost. This study adopts the case study method to observe the collaborative commerce implementation of enterprises in Taiwan. It explores the depth of enterprises implementing CPFR in three dimensions: collaboration relationship, Information Communication Technology (ICT) and Liaison devices. The situation of Taiwan’s nine enterprises implementing CPFR during 2003~2005 was analyzed. The results of the study can be used to give suggestions and references for enterprises in promoting CPFR in the future. The observation results are: 1. The closer the collaborative roles of parties such as suppliers, manufacturers, or retailers are to the client-side, the better the CPFR development is; 2. The development of CPFR is related to the enterprise infrastructure elements such as logistics and distribution, channel, the development of collaborative transport and ICT, etc.