The two have released a report entitled, "Collaborative Execution: Speed, Innovation and Profitability," based on a survey of 374 supply chain professionals.

"Collaborative execution is defined as working together to improve supply chain performance by continuously solving real problems with better information," said Fahim Afghan, vice president of research at SCM World, an online supply chain research forum. "We saw from a majority of responses that, by harnessing this collaboration, supply chains can be leaner, with less inventory and lower costs. At the same time, we saw the expectation that risk can be reduced and innovation increased, with a rapid rate of learning."

By a ratio of nearly two to one, supply chain professionals agreed that one of the biggest barriers to collaborative execution is a slow issue resolution process. This was identified as a systemic problem related to quality of information flow, in terms of both the granularity and timeliness of data shared.

Similarly, 92 percent of respondents agreed that rapid problem resolution was part of good collaboration, with an underlying theme that true collaboration can be defined in terms of speed, both in problem solving and in organizational learning. More than half of the responses indicated that speed of response in truly collaborative relationships was twice as fast or faster, with learning curve improvements more than 50 percent greater than in non-collaborative trading partner relationships.

"A key takeaway for me was that the trust and strategic maturity needed to foster good collaborative relationships do exist," said Mark Woodward, president and CEO at E2open, a provider of cloud-based solutions. "Yet the information flows and speed of resolution are not yet at satisfactory levels, which suggest that a greater investment in cloud-based systems is required to enable timely information exchange and faster collaboration."

Summary of Key Findings:

• Information sharing is the vital element of collaboration, with 73 percent and 83 percent, respectively, asserting that customers must share demand data and that suppliers in turn must disclose availability information

• Trust and governance are not key concerns for collaborative relationships, with less than one-third of respondents concerned with partners using information in a negative way

• Effective collaboration creates cost efficiency, with an overwhelming 80 percent strongly agreeing that they derive this benefit

• Eighty-two per cent of respondents believe collaborative relationships enhance the innovation process, enabling more effective experimentation

• The rate of learning increases by at least one-and-a-half times in a collaborative framework, according to 70 percent of respondents

The SCM World webinar and report covering the complete results of the "Collaborative Execution: Speed, innovation and profitability" study, including panelist insights from Lenovo, Avon and Orica, are  available from E2open. View the Collaborative Execution webinar. Download the Collaborative Execution report.

Source: E2open, SCM World