Supply chain

is an emerging term that emphasizes interac-tions among marketing, logistics, and production. With this term and its application come opportunities associated prima-rily with managing the logistics channel across the legal boundaries of enterprises, such as between firms and their sup-pliers. In this paper, there is a discussion of the evolution of lo-gistics to see how it is defined and practiced today, with the in-tent of highlighting the emerging opportunities for channel performance improvement. It is shown that supply chain man-agement has moved us from an intrafunctional vision of the channel toward an interfunctional and even inter-organiza-tional one. Examples are given to illustrate the type of prob-lems that are associated with each of these visions. Focus is given to those problems inherent in managing inter-organiza-tionally, since this is where traditional management tools and techniques are no longer appropriate. The new metrics, infor-mational sharing systems, and allocation-of-benefits proce-dures needed to operate in the expanded channel ar