Defining the IT productivity in the Supply chain and its influences in the supply chain performance is not a new research problem. Over the years, different approaches and models have been introduced in the literature to explain this relationship between IT and supply chain performance. To understand existing research in this area, the following research questions are formulated:

RQ1: How does IT impact Supply Chain Performance?

Rationale: Answering this research question can help identify different forms of the IT impact in the supply chain performance.

RQ2: What are the different aspects of this relationship that have been cited in the literature?

Rationale: Answering this research question can help identify the different aspects of the IT impact on SCP: positive or negative, direct or indirect.

RQ3: What research has been performing in the relation between IT and SCP?

Rationale: This question aims to locate and catalog the research studies have been performed to understand the relationship between IT and SCP.

RQ4: What findings can be drawn from existing studies?

Rationale: Answers to this research question can help to identify the gaps and suggest areas for further investigation in the relationship between IT and SCP.

To find relevant studies which are located at the intersection of supply chain, IT, Performance Measurement, an in-depth evaluation has been conducted of the papers and studies in the major online search academic article search engines as illustrated in the Table 1.

The research was done using a list of pre-defined key words as illustrated in Table 2, the words used to searches are often used in the literature to describe the area of study of Information Technology (IT) and its functional roles in the Supply Chain (For example: Information systems, ERP, transaction execution, collabora- tion, decision support…), and other words that are used in the literature to describe Supply Chain Performance (For example: Agility, responsiveness, efficiency…).

By taking all of the above aspects into account, a search query was specifically designed in order to find relevant papers for the relationship between Information Technology and supply chain performance, by combining keywords figured below through Boolean logic as illustrated in Table 3.

The following inclusion and exclusion criteria are defined to ensure that relevant studies are included and no study is excluded without evaluation.

Inclusion criteria:

I1: The theme of this study is the relationship between IT and Supply chain performance.

I2: This review covers the following topical areas:

Ÿ The impact of IT in the supply chain performance.

Ÿ The IT-related attributes in the SCP.

Ÿ The presence of IT in the supply chain performance measurement and indicators.

I3: This review target papers published between January 1, 2000 and February 20, 2014 in English.

Exclusion criteria:

E1: Any paper related to very narrow aspects is excluded.

E2: Any paper whose full text is not accessible is excluded.

E3: Any paper that was purely technical is excluded.

E4: Articles that did not match the inclusion criteria are excluded.

The research protocol is considered as an important quality assurance step of a Systematic Literature Review, it serves as the road map towards answers to research questions [11] .

The research protocol was drawn up in according with the [11] guidelines; the search protocol was carried out sequentially following these tree steps as shown in the Figure 2.

Phase 1: Gathering potential studies based on title and abstract review.

Phase 2: Application of eligibility criteria.

Phase 3: Selection studies based on full text assessment.

First of all, to identify potential primary studies, an automated and exhaustive research for papers was performed in each search engine. All relevant studies was regarded as potentially relevant and was stocked in a reference manager and academic social network (Mendely) to organize the selection on the basis of title and abstract.

The vast majority of studies founded in the first phase were inapplicable to the research question of this review; thus, the next two steps are the practical screen, that is, deciding which studies should even be considered for the review [11] .

The second phase of this search protocol consisted of an update on the list of primary studies, on the basis of inclusion and exclusion criteria to exclude irrelevant papers.

The final phase included assessments and reading the full-text of each remaining papers to check the selected papers that they fit to be included in the final selection.

All potentially eligible articles have been collected; as a basis for confidence in the final results, the next step in this review was the quality appraisal to examine the papers more closely to assess their quality because the quality of the final review depends very much on the quality of the primary studies that aren’t of equal quality [11] .

To appraise the quality of papers that had been selected, stricter criteria had been established for which papers should continue to be considered for the final study.

This quality assessment was performed using the following quality metrics shown in Table 4, inspired by [13] ’s recommendations.

These six criteria represent the minimum quality threshold, and just papers with 6/6 score are eligible.

In this stage, the data extraction was performed using the Mendely 1.11 to extract and manage citations and references for papers remained after the quality appraisal.

To answers the RQs defined above, specific data was extracted from the selected studies as shown in Table 5.

The bibliographic reference, type, aims, research methods, findings, conclusions and future research are reported to be analyzed in results section.

After executing all stages of the research process, only 33 papers were identified as relevant papers (shown in Table 6) and were chosen to be analyzed in this review.

The literature had been characterized by presenting the number of publication by year, the methodology that had been applied, and the results from quality appraisal.

The effective understanding of the relationship between IT and Supply Chain Performance requires an integrative framework that links the three themes, because the greater amount of selected papers treated two or three themes. Figure 3 presents the integrative framework.

Each of 33 papers was assessed according to the 6 quality criteria as defined above, Table 12 shows the results of the quality appraisal. As shown in Table 5, the majority of papers got a higher score, 23 papers got 6 which represent more than 70%, the higher score was 6, the lowest was 3 and the median was 5.4.

A number of limitations of the current review can be noted. The key limitation is linked to the paper selection process, and the research was limited to five search engines, which means that some useful papers could have been excluded. However, due to the choice of research request, keywords, and period of publication, come useful articles were excluded.

In the phase of the data extraction, several papers lacked sufficient details about the methodology, data analysis, findings and future research work. This represents a risk that extraction process might have performed in some inaccuracy in the data.

At the end of this systematic review, several promising research directions have been illuminated, and can be further investigated in the future research projects.

Taking into account that the majority of papers have been performed using a Survey or case study Methodologies, which don’t seek to be representative and may limit the generalization of the findings. Future research is needed to determine whether the findings reported are valid in other areas of firms, in other industries, using a time-series data with multiple informants from each organization [4] [18] - [23] .

All papers adopted a perceptual approach to measure the SCM performance that focused just in financial performance. Further work can attempt to blend in objective data in an effort to validate the findings. Using key performance indicators (KPIs) approach may also be a good benchmark and choice in measure SCM performance for future research [7] [21] .

Other types of IT-related attributes could influence supply chain performance that deserve further research attention, for example: IT utilization, internal IT integration, and management commitment to IT for supply chain management [21] .

The findings affirmed that some IT attributes have a more direct and significant impact on performance for some kinds of supply chain than others, a model for matching IT characteristics with supply chain characteristics is needed to help managers to easily find the best form of IT implementation [4] .

There is a need for developing performance measures and metrics for measuring the performance and suitability of IT in Supply Chain Management [16] .

Future research could examine the interdependence between some aspects and information technology and the effect of their interactions on the firm’s supply chain, for example, human capital, and environmental variables [6] [24] .