The Extended Enterprise: Gaining Competitive Advantage Through Collaborative Supply Chains

You can't compete and win alone. Today, constellations of firms ally against each other--and the firm that stands alone, may fail alone. Now there's a start-to-finish guide to the opportunities and challenges facing today's extended enterprise. In The Extended Enterprise, authors Edward W. Davis and Robert E. Spekman show why extended enterprises demand radically new buyer-supplier relationships, why traditional business structures inhibit alliances and partnerships, and how to develop the competencies your company needs right now.

Drawing on extensive research and new case studies, you get realistic strategies for planning, building, and managing the extended enterprise. You'll learn how to decide when to partner and who to partner with; align processes to improve information flow; and especially, develop people who'll work well across organizational boundaries. Above all, the authors offer deep insight into the attitudinal and behavioral changes that are needed in order to rapidly achieve results and sustain them for the long term.

EDWARD W. DAVIS, Oliver Wight Professor of BusinessAdministration at University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School ofBusiness Administration, specializes in supply chain management,manufacturing strategy, global sourcing, and developing high-performanceorganizations. He has authored more than 100 case studies and authoredor co-authored three books on project and production management. He hastaught at Harvard Business School, Sloan School of Management at MIT,and the University of North Carolina.

ROBERT E. SPEKMAN is Tayloe Murphy Professor of BusinessAdministration at Darden. He is a globally recognized authority on B2Bmarketing, supply chains, channel management, and strategic alliances.His consulting experience ranges from competitive analysis to strategicmarket planning, distribution design and implementation to strategicpartnering. He has written or edited seven books, and authored orco-authored over 80 articles and papers. Before joining the Dardenfaculty in 1991, Spekman taught at the University of SouthernCalifornia, University of Maryland, and the Norwegian School of BusinessAdministration and Economics.