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Ensuring continuity of supply while maximizing profitability are primary goals of corporate disciplines like procurement, logistics, production, or distribution. Each discipline for itself has established concepts to reduce or cope with inherent hazards that may hinder inbound or outbound product flows as well as shrinkage, all eventually harming continuity of supply.

Die Automobilindustrie verfolgt das Ziel, im Markt angekundigte neue Fahrzeugbaureihen nach einer zeit- und kosteneffizienten Anlaufphase termin- und qualitatsgerecht auszuliefern. Dies bedingt eine enge Abstimmung der an der Leistungserstellung beteiligten internen wie externen Akteure. Hierzu dient die Formulierung und konsequente Einhaltung einer Anlaufstrategie auf Unternehmensebenewie auch deren Ausbreitung auf samtliche am Serienanlauf beteiligte Unternehmen.

Supply Chain Event Management (SCEM) is an emerging topic in both business practice and academia. It receives increasing attention as more companies implement SCEM-systems. However, despite its practical relevance, no general definition of SCEM exists in literature or within companies until today. Also, so far SCEM has not been operationalized for quantitative studies. Thus, the goal of this paper is to contribute to an understanding of SCEM by defining a measurement instrument to measure the level of SCEM-adoption in companies. This has been approached on the one hand by pursuing a literature review of both practitioners and academic literature and on the other hand by conducting case studies in companies using SCEM-systems. First, a common definition of SCEM is generated from a combination of findings from literature and expert interviews, and second, a measurement instrument for SCEM-adoption is developed. Implications include advice on how to test the SCEM-adoption measurement instrument statistically in order to asses its ability to measure SCEM-adoption with high validity.

Overall, it can be experienced that the public discussion on retailer-supplier collaboration in product development and launch is in an infancy stage. Yet, within the companies of retailers and suppliers major work is under way. Retailers are building up customer intelligence, strategic category management and capabilities to quickly turn product opportunities into profits. Suppliers are getting prepared to integrate information they get from retailers into their product creation processes, and are adjusting product, production and logistics design to deliver to retailer requests. So, it is probably not a speculation to say that one of the next fields for major improvement in the consumer goods industry is the redesign of the industry’s product development and launch processes.