Towards the collaborative design of supply chain relationships

Although companies place significant focus upon the design of their products and internal processes, rarely is a similar amount of effort used to design supply chains. Chains are left to evolve in an informal manner, leading to a lack of co-ordination and serious misalignments. This issue is often exacerbated by the requirement to include specific companies, further constraining the chain operation. It is proposed that (re) designing relationships between companies in supply chains offers significant scope for operational improvements and this paper presents such a methodology. The approach encourages companies to consider their needs as both a customer and a supplier and thus relationship attributes can be defined. The approach is based upon a collaborative design philosophy and is supported by novel software, SCET (Supply Chain Evaluation Tool). A case study is presented to illustrate the application of the methodology and shows how it is capable of successfully redesigning chain relationships.