Frameworks for Planning Collaborative Supply Chain Programs

This dissertation is written in three progressively restrictive parts. Part I is a set of two expansive essays on collaborative supply chain management that proposes several new perspectives and interconnections between current day global business and economic issues, and the evolving supply chain structures and decision-making paradigms that depend on extensive inter-firm collaboration. Part I also develops new guidelines for both practitioners as well as academic researchers in their quest to incorporate collaborative requirements as an explicit component of existing planning frameworks and modeling approaches. Part I further comments on how the technological evolution of manufacturing, service, and general business processes have led to decentralized structures that require a fundamentally collaborative approach to the planning of such processes. We also argue that existing supply chain decision-making and planning approaches are modeled in the fashion of corporate and enterprise resource planning systems, which given their scope, limit the extent of collaboration in both planning and in execution. The arguments and discussion in this part are not specific to any particular supply chain function and is without technological bias. The frameworks presented in Part I are also unified in their approach to managing supply chains of service providers, manufacturing partners, or some combination of both types of activities. This unified presentation is also a fundamental contribution of this first part of the dissertation.;Part II of the dissertation, while still expansive in scope of application and the range of industry sectors and supply chain environments discussed, develops the ideas presented in Part I for more specific (or functional) categories of business processes. A commonly accepted categorization of operational processes, at least in manufacturing settings, is into (i) product design and development or related projects, which are akin to services in the nature and interaction between implied tasks, (ii) procurement, production, and customer service processes, and (iii) logistics and distribution networks. Projects are typically represented as a network of inter-related activities bound by a common purpose, and by a time-line dictated by a finite product or project life cycle; activities are also sometimes defined and created in response to project environments. Processes in the procurement, production, customer service, or logistics domains, on the other hand, are typically modeled as a set of inter-related but more loosely coupled activities that are repeated indefinitely across multiple product or project life cycles. Our primary concern in Part II is to understand environments where projects and processes span multiple firms, and therefore require a collaborative effort, not only for executing the activities entailed, but also in the planning of the tasks and projects.;Part III which is more restrictive in its statements and conclusions, is devoted to models of collaborative supply chain management that are motivated by the imperatives outlined in Part I, but whose elements are defined by the strategic frameworks and structuring guidelines of Part II . While Part III derives guidance from Part II in the formulation of its models, it can also be viewed and read independently for its contributions to the (related) academic literature. Part III consists again of two independent modeling exercises. Through either of these exercises, we address two of the most important problems in collaborative supply chain planning: partner selection, or alternatively task and project assignment, and decentralized capacity management in a supply chain or logistics environment. These models describe two different environments where collaborative planning is vital to the success of firms: (i) decentralized and collaborative projects or programs that involve the financial, technological, and human resources of several firms towards a common revenue or savings objective, and (ii) collaborative but decentralized logistics and transportation systems where several firms in a supply chain must invest in common fulfillment or processing infrastructure, and further determine the material flows within that logistics network.;Through both models, we show how decentralized capacity investment can be inefficient relative to centralized planning. We also characterize the decentralized equilibrium behavior of firms under the proportional risk-sharing regimes. We then provide mechanisms that can coordinate the decentralized systems, where coordination is defined here in a more limited sense as the development of decentralized equilibria that match the central planner's capacity requirement. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...