Abstract:
The development of Internet has revolutionized the businesses across the globe by
streamlining their supply chain, thereby achieving substantial cost reduction. The
concept of "agile and lean manufacturing", which brought in radical changes in
manufacturing systems all over the world has its bearing on the development of open
standards and efficient networking across the corporate houses. In this paper, we look
how the learnings from manufacturing sector could be translated into the "information
industry", so as to develop libraries for the next millennium. We develop the supply
chain of information, extending right from the point of origin to the point of use,
thereby identifying the non-value adding delays in the process. The model is
illustrated, without loss of generality, through the example of a journal publication.
The paper brings out a decision model for effective deployment of technology for
minimising these delays. The various stumbling blocks in this re-engineering exercise
along with possible ways of elimination are also discussed. The pro-active libraries,
constrained by resource limitation, can achieve quantum jumps in development, if
technology is judiciously deployed to eliminate the delays in the supply chain. The
main objective of this work is to develop a working strategy for developing "agile"
libraries that are quick and flexible, to respond to the changing needs of the end user.
The paper also details the policy measures required for the effective implementation of
the supply chain model.