Abstract

Good collaboration plays an important role in effective supply chain management. The main obstacle to collaboration within a supply chain is a conflict between each enterprise’s local optimization and the chain’s global optimization. We show that in addition to relationships, trust, contract and other social factors, sharing and reallocation of payoff are critical to align the objective of each member enterprise from local optimization to global optimization. We propose collaboration systems, which take advantage of information technology in the digital economy, to set up payoff reallocation and information sharing mechanism. These systems can be used to foster solid collaboration relationships within one supply chain. We identify the system requirements and outline the Web-based systems schema. The collaboration systems have four indivisible components: measuring performance; monitoring performance and payoff re-allocation; global optimization algorithm, and reconfiguration: planning, forecasting and recommendation. The challenges, impediments and enablers to implement the proposed collaboration systems are also discussed in the paper.

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