چالشهای تأمین تجهیزات در سال 2007 : رقابت به منظور بررسی استراتژی های تأمین تجهیزات مختلط

Global competition is putting a premium on the ability to manage risk through flexible and agile web-enabled procurement practices. This article discusses the design of the 2007 “supply chain management – procurement challenge” (SCM-PC), a competition designed by the first three authors to evaluate the performance of mixed procurement strategies that balance risk through combinations of long-term, quantity-flexible contracts and one-off contracts. Specifically, the SCM-PC challenge revolves around a PC assembly scenario, where web-enabled trading agents developed by different teams compete for components required to assemble different types of PCs. Collectively the authors represent the top three entries in the 2007 procurement challenge. They present the strategies their teams developed for the competition, compare their performances, and discuss lessons learned from the competition.

The web is enabling manufacturing enterprises to explore more flexible and agile procurement practices. As product life cycles become shorter and demand becomes more difficult to predict, both manufacturers and suppliers are looking for new ways of sharing risk. Manufacturers are trying to move away from static, long-term contracts that would require them to take unacceptable levels of risk, while trying to secure price and availability guarantees from their suppliers. Simultaneously, suppliers are seeking demand and payment guarantees from their customers. This in turn translates into long-term procurement contracts, where suppliers and manufacturers often agree on some levels of flexibility (e.g. quantity, price, or service levels). These contracts are often supplemented with one-off procurement arrangements to accommodate surges in demand or address significant price disruptions.

With the web opening the door to more agile procurement strategies where manufacturers manage risk through a mix of long-term and one-off contracts, it becomes increasingly important to develop a better understanding of the risk and behaviors associated with these practices. In this paper, we provided an overview of the supply chain trading agent competition procurement challenge (SCM-PC), a game developed by the first three authors to capture many of the strategic interactions entailed by these new practices. The game builds on the success of a scenario introduced by the third author in 2002 in the context of an annual tournament, now known as the TAC-SCM baseline game, a somewhat more complex game that requires competing agents to coordinate both component procurement and customer bidding activities while managing their finite assembly capacity. In contrast, the SCM-PC scenario was designed to (1) focus solely on procurement decisions, and (2) introduce an environment where manufacturing agents need to manage risk through a combination of long-term quantity-flexible contracts and one-off contracts. This scenario has the merit of capturing decisions that more closely resemble those faced by many companies today, given the decoupling between procurement and sales traditionally imposed by prevailing ERP architectures. We proceeded to provide an overview of the top three entries in the first edition of the procurement challenge, which was collocated with the AAAI-07 conference in Vancouver. Results from the competition indicate that all three agents developed strategies that combined both long-term and one-off procurement opportunities, suggesting that the overall design of the game was successful. A finer analysis shows however that, in its initial form, the competition was still biased towards one-off contracts in part due to a dearth of information available to agents at the beginning of the game, when they need to negotiate long-term contracts. An additional incentive for being conservative with long-term contracts in this first edition of the competition had to do with the separation between long-term and one-off suppliers. Agents that do not bid aggressively on long-term contracts are still guaranteed a chance to compete for component capacity set aside by one-off suppliers. In 2008, the first three authors decided to lift this restriction and allow each supplier to sell its capacity under both long-term and one-off contracts, a decision expected to lead to more competitive behaviors in the long-term contracting phase of the game. Future versions of the game could also allow agents to enter long-term contracts in mid course, rather than limit long-term contract negotiation to the initial phase of the game.