The goal of supply chain management is to improve the efficiency with which a company buys, sells and produces materials or services, inherently reducing the costs associated with these activities. These challenges cannot be effectively met by isolated change to specific organizational units, but instead depend critically on the relationships and interdependencies among different organizations or units. Traditionally, marketing, distribution, planning, manufacturing, and the purchasing organizations along the supply chain operated independently and there is a need for a mechanism through which these different functions can be integrated together.