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Facing today's highly volatile global market, the industries have well accepted the concept of supply chain management (SCM) that integrating upstream and downstream to improve the competitiveness of products. However, product innovation capability becomes critical once most of the competitors sit on equal SCM basis. The relative studies showed that traditional collaboration between manufacturer and supplier had limited help to the innovation of product and no rigid connection between the "collaboration" and "product innovation" in the industries. The disadvantage of product innovation in traditional supply chain may be explained by over-emphasis on manufacturing operation in the past. In order to solve the problem of product innovation, although both design chain and customer chain have been suggested by practitioners and scholars recently to be integrated into traditional supply chain. To our best effort, the studies and literatures are still scarce, especially for customer chain. This empirical study conducted by regression to discover thoroughly regarding key factors that may influence the effectiveness of customer chain to be integrated into traditional supply chain. The analysis results reveal that situations of data warehousing system as well as flexible service workflow are the major factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]