The result is the ability to react systematically to higher consumer demand by building and selling more cars, making more money for every member of the chain. That s why you ve been reading so much about it lately. Today, however, most members in a supply chain operate as single separate units. Typically, these systems are traditional ERP systems that do a good job within an enterprise but don t provide the plumbing required to share processes and data with other ERP installations or custom enterprise applications. Therein lies the problem.
Conformity is the easiest to understand but the most difficult to implement.
It s the process of going to all the supply chain members and convincing them to use the same application, even the same physical system and database. The idea is that if everyone uses the same system application services, database schema, and data, then integration is not an issue. There would be nothing to integrate. The downside of conformity is cost and culture. What s more, most organizations simply don t want to share data easily with other organizations.