Today's distributed supply chain crosses the vast network of suppliers providing services to deliver manufactured goods to the market. Speed and accuracy move products and services along the supply chain to deliver first to the customer at the least possible cost. Results such as these only happen when there is tight coordination with all suppliers as anything can go wrong at any time. One mistake and you can watch your margins dry up. The solution, SAP's Distributed manufacturing consists of sharing information with all business partners, both internal and external to coordinate production across the enterprise and throughout the entire supply chain. Collaborative manufacturing enables companies to react quickly to changes in demand or to problems in production while still maintaining high levels of customer service. Collaborative manufacturing supports multiple manufacturing strategies including configure to order, make to order and make to stock to insure that both push and pull production scenarios are covered. Collaborative manufacturing insures the consistent flow of engineering data and insures integration with other critical processes such as cost accounting, human resources, material management, plant maintenance and quality management.