Secure Collaboration in Global Supply Chain Management

Daniel Dumke — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 09:54:07 +0000

One of the fundamental problems in supply chain management in general is that of finding the right trade-offs between information sharing and keeping one’s distance towards potential competitors.

Zeng et al. did a literature review to collect some of the current insights on how to solve this problem.

Collaboration in product design and supply chain environment

Figure 1: Collaborative Product Development Process (Zeng et al., 2012)

Figure 1 shows a typical process from problem formulation up to delivery of the finished product. This process can be decomposed into: collaborative product development (CPD), design chain management (DCM) and supply chain management (SCM).

Collaboration conflicts

Several conflicts threaten the viability of the collaboration. These are all related to the information which is interchanged by the stakeholders.

Figure 2 shows the information flow.

Figure 2: Information Flow between Supply Chain Participants (Zeng et al., 2012)

This information can be divided into information to protect and information to share.
Figure 3 lists some of the relevant information.

Figure 3: Information to Protect and Information to Share (Zeng et al., 2012)

Securing collaboration

Figure 4 summarizes the problem analysis and the corresponding conclusions the authors draw.

Figure 4: Problem Analysis and Potential Solutions (Zeng et al., 2012)

The authors suggest and elaborate on four categories to secure collaboration:

Computer security and privacy technologies
Which consists of measures for access control and secure multi-party computation, where computations can be done on multiple datasets without revealing the underlying information. Furthermore privacy-preserving location-based services are summarized here.
Information partitioning
This contains the aspects of document classification and risk management.
Contract management
Partner relationship management
Here the authors include trust management and innovation capability and reverse engineering mitigation.

Last but not least figure 5 summarizes the current state of the art for the above mentioned problems and potential future research directions.

Figure 5: Future Research Directions on Secure Collaboration (Zeng et al., 2012)

Conclusion

The authors take the view of a computer scientist and find technical solutions (like secure multi-party computation) to fight supply chain problems.
One of the first things that came to my mind: “One cannot use technology to solve social problems.”
I do think that those measures should be pursued further in research as well as business. But the first steps have to be done by describing and defining their individual information buckets, by answering the strategic question: What information is core to our business and should be protected and what can be shared?

Reference:

Zeng, Y., Wang, L., Deng, X., Cao, X., & Khundker, N. (2012). Secure collaboration in global design and supply chain environment: Problem analysis and literature review Computers in Industry, 63 (6), 545-556 DOI: 10.1016/j.compind.2012.05.001

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Managing Strategic Partnerships

Daniel Dumke — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 06:57:00 +0000

Setting up the right partnerships is hard to do. There are multiple levels to the decision with which companies to setup formal relations and how deep this relationship should be? Christopher and Jüttner (2000) develop a framework for managing partnerships. The full paper can be found here.

Introduction

The authors use focus group interviews and multiple case studies to gain insights into practitioners’ experiences.
Several factors are affecting an increasing focus on partnership management: The value chain orientation, rationalization of the supplier base, growing interdependencies and growing focus on the competition of supply chains and not companies.

Framework for Strategic Partnerships (Christopher and Jüttner, 2000)

Framework

The key factors of the framework are: to define a balanced set of relationships, development of an interface structure, cooperation, change management, relationship promoters and monitoring.

Defining a balanced set of relationships
Keep in mind that partnerships are resource-intensive investments, first a company has to define its own strategy. Since the complexity of the network is dependent on number of levels, the existing relationships have to be evaluated: Can I substitute suppliers, buyers, goods? What are our common interest and what are my transaction cost? Christoper and Jüttner suggest, that this should not be done by multidimensional evaluation matrices, but a simple hierarchy to rank the suppliers / buyers may be sufficient. To generate some incentives for new comers this ranking and the generation process should be made transparent.
Developing the right interface structure
The authors argue that the quality of relationship is influenced by the closeness of the parties. There are distinctive types of interfaces which can be used for such a relationship: 1) only buyer / seller interaction (focus on price and margin, few resources invested, large number of relationships); 2) closer collaboration between buying and selling (“account management”); 3) relationship between companies, where there is direct interaction between a range of functions and usually substantial investment in the relationship
Cooperation
Here aspects like information sharing or data accuracy come into play. Also the sensitive parts of partnership are important
Change management
The authors want to point out that the change towards a company which embraces strategic relationships is not an easy one. Therefore managing people through this change is an essential part of partnership management.
Assigning a relationship promoter
To prevent relationship issues a relationship promoter on each side of the partnership is advised.
Monitoring the relationships
Monitoring can be done in a formal and / or informal way. The important point here is not to loose track of what has been achieved and how it was achieved.

Conclusion

Christopher and Jüttner provide a refreshing read on strategic partnership management. Refreshing, because they are not focussed on only one possible way eg. to measure the performance of the chain. They acknowledge that depending on the context a more informal way of measuring might be appropriate as well.

Reference:

Christopher, M., & Jüttner, U. (2000). Developing strategic partnerships in the supply chain: a practitioner perspective European Journal of Purchasing & Supply Management, 6 (2), 117-127 DOI: 10.1016/S0969-7012(99)00038-6

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