Book excerpt: Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2010 in the subject Business economics - Supply, Production, Logistics, grade: 1,2, European School of Business Reutlingen (Business Adminstration), language: English, abstract: The environmental surroundings of most companies have changed radically in recent years. Especially the competitive pressure has risen substantially over the past decades, fuelled by an increased globalization of markets and supply chains. In order to continuously satisfy consumer needs in a timely manner, organizations have to focus on performance and efficiency improvement measures. In terms of supply chain management, performance includes the three dimensions efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility which have to be dealt with on an equal basis. One mean to improve supply chain performance is the linkage between various IT applications involved in the whole supply chain. These efforts and trends are treated under the term electronic supply chain management (E-SCM). There are three major critical success factors for the successful operation of an electronic supply chain. These can be clustered into decision motivation (e.g. a shared vision and a strong motivation), implementation process (e.g. the tight integration of inter-organizational information systems and the re-engineering of inter-organizational business processes) and infrastructure conditions (e.g. agreement upon a shared industry standard). There are numerous benefits of an E-SCM implementation such as increased communication speed and decreased cost in terms of communication, inventory and customer service. Furthermore, E-SCM allows mitigating the bullwhip effect by improv-ing the availability of information throughout the entire supply chain. In addition E-SCM allows organizations to implement an entirely pull-based approach. One downside of E-SCM is the need to make a company’s entire business processes transparent, also towards supply chain partners who might be engaged with competitors. A further danger of E-SCM is to over-rely on speed rather than on flexibility.