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Introduction
Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has achieved factory automation and smart manufacturing; thus, many countries have called for the return of manufacturing. Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have changed outsourcing strategies, especially for the return of manufacturing and assembly. It is important to understand how manufacturers integrate partners in supply chain networks to meet customer needs. One of the goals of implementing Industry 4.0 is to quickly reflect the needs of consumers through AI technology and cooperation with supply chain partners (Babiceanu and Seker, 2016). Customer service capabilities are gaining center stage in supply chain networks. Many manufacturers build the ability to respond to market changes to improve firm performance (Vickery et al., 2003; Setia et al., 2013; Yang and Lirn, 2017). Along with the growing recognition of the role of customers in service creation and delivery, building a firm's response speed capability is important.
Supply chain integration (SCI) is broadly defined as the extent to which a firm is interconnected and aligned with its partners, including both customer and supplier integration. Integration is a strategic consideration for enterprises. For manufacturers, it is important to consider customer integration and supplier integration at the same time because supply chain processes move from upstream to downstream. Using the triadic view (including the enterprise itself and its suppliers and customers), we can explore which SCI is more beneficial to improve organizational performance. However, only a few references have mentioned whether the manufacturing firm places a different emphasis on customer integration or supplier integration due to certain factors. For example, to achieve supply chain flexibility, supplier integration is more important than customer integration (Fayezi and Zomorrodi, 2015). The company's size affects the manufacturing firm's preference for customer integration or supplier integration (Vanichchinchai, 2019). Frohlich and Westbrook (2001) also argued that the combinations of different levels of customer integration and supplier integration could have different impacts on firm performance. Flynn et al. (2010) further argued that two types of SCI patterns, high levels of customer leaning and uniform integration, have significant impacts on operational performance. This study uses the triadic view to verify the impact of organizational structure on SCI. We argue that understanding the network of SCI can further promote customer service and the manufacturer's operational performance.
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