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Considers the recent development of time‐based management as a way
of enhancing the competitive position of a manufacturing organization.
Based on a review of literature related to time‐based management,
several possible relationships between the use of time‐based competition
and its benefits in attaining stated business goals are defined. Results
of empirical investigation using the manufacturing firms in the State of
Indiana are discussed and some preliminary conclusions about the use of
time‐based competition strategies among manufacturing organizations are
drawn. The results of this study suggest that a full‐scale study of
international scope will be beneficial to judge the use of time as a
competitive weapon among manufacturing firms.

The distributed corporate networking technology environments of the 1970s and 1980s are gaining new life, only this time the move toward distributed networks is being led by upstart application service providers (ASPs). Organizations of the twenty‐first century are going to be Web‐centric and focus their objectives on agility and cost savings. Pressure to reduce overhead in information technology (IT) pushes these organizations to consider outsourcing. With the use of Internet technology, a new alternative for IT outsourcing has evolved. ASPs allow companies to access and run software applications over the Internet on a subscription basis. By using the Web as an application platform, an enterprise can quickly and easily deploy new systems in response to market changes as well as reap the savings of using a single, standard platform. Recently, there has been a tremendous growth in the number of ASPs. This growth in ASPs has raised several issues and challenges that need to be resolved to realize the potential benefits of ASPs. Discusses the developments in ASPs, outlines the activities of various kinds of ASPs, describes the ASP business models, and examines the issues and challenges facing ASPs for their future success.

Many companies have adopted electronic data interchange (EDI), often with results inconsistent with the expectations of the company. In these instances, it is often the mismatch between expectations and the company's activities undertaken to achieve the desired performance gain that fuels their dissatisfaction with EDI. This same mismatch often causes academic research into EDI and supply chain management to lose focus. This article presents a framework of EDI benefits in a supply chain management context that can be used to match a company's EDI efforts with its desired outcomes from EDI use. The framework states that two critical factors to understanding EDI's impact on supply chain management are the span of management control of the business process in question and whether EDI directly or indirectly influences that same business process. The proposed framework is then used to develop a research agenda for EDI and supply chain management. We suggest possible directions for research methods, measure development and hypothesis generation that can be used in future research studies.

PurposeAims to explore the relationships between groupware use and the knowledge management process.Design/methodology/approachThe activities comprising the knowledge management process are conceptualized as: knowledge creation, knowledge maintenance, knowledge distribution, and knowledge review and revision. The data for this exploratory study were gathered through a telephone survey of managers at Fortune 1000 firm divisions. Based on the prior literature, it was expected that use of certain types of groupware and certain aspects of the knowledge management process would be significantly associated with each other.FindingsThe results of this exploratory study show that the groupware tools which enhance or support traditional aural media were significantly associated with most of the knowledge management processes we identified. However, e‐mail is the sole groupware tool that is significantly associated with knowledge distribution.Originality/valueAs an exploratory study, this research highlights some interesting trends in the knowledge management process, and suggests multiple lines of future research.