Other companies partner through shared projects .For example, many larger retailers are working closely with suppliers on in-store programs .Home Depot allows key suppliers to use its stores as a testing ground for new merchandising programs .The suppliers spend time at Home Depot stores watching how their product sells and how customers relate to it .They then creat programs specially tailored to Home Depot and its customers .Western Publishing Group ,publisher of “Little Golden Books” for children ,formed a similar partnership with Toys ‘R’Us. Western and the giant toy retailer coordinated their marketing strategies to creat mini-bookstore sections-called Books ‘R’Us-within each Toys ‘R’Us store. Toys ‘R’Us provides the locations, space, and customers, Western serve as distributor, consolidator, and servicer for the Books ‘R’Us program. Clerly, both the supplier and customer benefit from such partnerships.
Channel partnerships may also take the form of information sharing and continuous inventory replenishment systems. Companies manage their supply chains through information. Suppliers link up with customers through electronic interchange (EDI) systems to share information and coordinate their logistics decisions. Here are just two examples:
Information sharing is at the heart of supplier-customer relationships. Increasingly, high- performance retailers are sharing point-of-sale scanner data with their suppliers through electronic data interchange. Wal-mart was one of the first companies to provide suppliers with timely sales data. With its retail link system, major suppliers have “earth stations” installed by which they are directly connected to wal-mart’s information network. Now, the same system that tells wal-mart what customers are buying lets suppliers know what to produce and where to ship the goods . thus, when a teenager buys a size 10 nike running shoe, the information goes directly to nike’s computers , triggering replacement or producting. Wal-mart no longer issues purchase orders to some of its most reliable suppliers. These suppliers automatically replenish wal-mart’s inventory based on the retailer’s scanner data and their knowledge of wal-mart’s operations.
最好是人工翻译，不要用软件，谢谢
这篇文章的名称是 Integrated Logistics Management