Supply chain collaboration practices in consumer goods industry

The increasing number of products offered at retail stores and the narrow retail margins are making it increasingly difficult for retailers in the consumer goods industry to manage their operations effectively. Many retailers have realized the importance of working closely with their manufacturers but only few have succeeded in doing it right. Motivated by conflicting observations from practice, the goal of this thesis is to investigate the effectiveness of some of the recent manufacturer-retailer collaboration practices.; The first part of the thesis is motivated by the Collaborative Forecasting (CPFR) initiative in the consumer goods sector. The goal of this initiative is to create standards for inter-firm information exchange and collaboration with specific emphasis on sharing and reconciling demand forecasts. We investigate the conditions that favor the establishment of collaborative forecasting between a manufacturer and a retailer. Our results have implications concerning the appropriateness of investing in collaboration technology to extract and use information from both parties in a supply chain.; The second and third parts of the thesis are motivated by the category captainship initiative in the consumer goods industry. Recently, retailers have started to rely on their leading manufacturers in retail categories for recommendations about category management decisions such as pricing and assortment, a practice often referred to as category captainship. The goal of the second part is to deepen our understanding of the consequences of such collaboration initiatives between the retailer and only one of its manufacturers (i.e., the category captain). We investigate the impact of the transition from retail category management to category captainship on all stakeholders in the supply chain. Our research offers design recommendations on the scope and structure of category captainship implementations.; The third part takes a closer look at how and when the retailer should delegate the assortment selection decision to its leading manufacturers. We compare the performance of different strategies in delegating the assortment selection decisions and demonstrate how category captainship would influence the variety offered to the consumers.