انتخاب تامین کننده مبتنی بر قدرت در پروژه های توسعه محصول

As stronger supplier might exert their power to influence a product development project for their own benefit, business negotiations will be more efficient if the customer has a clear understanding of its power with regards to each of its potential suppliers. This article takes the customer perspective in dealing with supplier selection and proposes a method to estimate the power of a customer versus potential suppliers. Based on an evaluation of their power, potential suppliers are then ranked. This selection procedure is illustrated with an example and evaluated against a case study taken from academic literature.

Development and manufacturing of products by a company require the support of a reliable supply chain (SC) (see [18] and [22]). The quality of collaborations with suppliers can either improve or worsen the performance of the overall project. Well coordinated activities between customer and supplier improve the chances of the project to succeed by potentially decreasing costs, order cycle times, reducing the risk of delivery delay and improving of quality (see [10], [11], [29] and [31]). But the dependency generated by necessary collaborations with suppliers can also become a threat for the company's success or production capability, especially if conflicts appear or if suppliers’ problems are propagated across the supply chain (see [3]). Building up a supply chain and creating an efficient basis for collaboration are two of the crucial issues for any product development project. This research is focused on the design and deployment of supply chains and the supplier selection process in particular. Conventional supplier selection methods concentrate on the performance or cost of the suppliers or their products. By contrast this paper research focuses on the relationship between the customer and the supplier through the notion of power and provides a formal method to assess the relative power of the customer and the supplier according to a set of criteria selected as part of the method. A large powerful business can enforce unfavourable conditions on its suppliers, while other businesses negotiate as equal partners. If a company overestimates or underestimates its power, it could damage its ability to negotiate, the collaboration with the supplier or customer and reduce its own profitability and agility. A customer, who overestimates its power will have challenging discussions with potential suppliers. While a supplier, who overestimates its power, could bid at the wrong conditions or refuse a contract expecting to be able to obtain more positive conditions and loose business. Underestimated power might lead companies to accept uncomfortable concessions. Therefore to reach a fair deal companies need to be aware of their own power and that of their potential suppliers or customers. To set a context the paper presents in Section 2 a generic model of the supplier selection process, before discussing the literature on selection criteria for suppliers and different theories of power. Section 3 presents the main concepts and the power-based partner selection method using performance metrics as the key to an approximate description of the relative power of actual or potential players in a supply chain and illustrated by a small factious example. In this approach every performance metric or selection criterion is transformed into a power factor, which are aggregated by rules to develop a single power value as explained in Section 4. In Section 5 the approach is applied to a case study extracted from a joint work of Huang and Keskar [20], and the results are compared regarding their value and robustness. Section 6 discusses the role the method can play in a design process. Finally, some conclusions and suggestions for further work end the paper.

The power assessment approach uses performance metrics to assess the relative power of potential suppliers. These performance metrics are selected and evaluated. The same values can be used for traditional performance based supplier selection methods. However, these approaches focus only on suppliers, i.e. on one party involved in bilateral relations. By contrast, the power-based approach focuses on the relations between two parties as power is inherently a rational concept (see [15]). The performance metric's values are used by experts of the company to judge how strong their dependencies might be on a potential supplier or in other words what the price is they are ready to pay to obtain their collaboration. Therefore the focus is put on the relation as well as the two parties themselves. Power-based performance-based selection looks in a different ways at the same problem and therefore can be used in parallel. In the power-based approach, each performance metric value is transformed into a power factor through the users’ judgement. Formal techniques, introduced in Section 4, allow to aggregate these power factors into a relative power value between −1 and +1. This is simple but also transparent and systematic. No factor is ignored and the user of the method can reflect at each step whether the results correspond to their intuitions. The design of a supply chain and partner selection in particular takes considerable effort in any organisation. The organisation needs to understand what is important to them in the selection of a particular supplier, i.e. they need to define the criteria by which to evaluate them. They should become aware of the variation between the different suppliers for that particular criterion but they should also understand what constitutes a good or a bad offer. This is a part way towards setting the thresholds. The power-based selection approach therefore can give structure to activities, which are going on anyway albeit in a fragmented way. Applying the power-based selection approach can benefit a company in two ways. The final aggregate value can inform a final selection decision. It provides objective bases to present and justify a decision. The breakdown of relative power for each criterion can be a useful aid in the detailed negotiations to improve relative power for each criterion. Relative power does not only matter in the selection of a supplier, but also through out the running of the supply chain. The method can also provide background information for interacting with suppliers, as it makes the strengths and weaknesses explicit. This can also support decision making throughout a contractual relation when knowing which factor an actor cares about can be useful. Again this can be useful either as a simple aggregate value, as to how powerful a company is compared to a particular supplier or as a more differentiated understanding for relative power for individual criteria. Understanding the relative power towards a supplier is particularly important in cases when the supplier is new and the interaction is over an extended period of time. With established suppliers power might come into contract or price negotiations, but other long-term factors also play a role. For one-off orders relative power plays a role, but whether the method would be deployed depends on how critical the order is and how large the order volume is, to justify the effort. However, when a new supplier for an on-going interaction is selected, the organisation needs to understand its relative position to that company and communicate it internally. As stronger parties might exert their power to influence the collaboration for their own benefit, each party should be aware of its relative power to minimise frustration and conflicts. On-going research looks at improving the power-based selection approach technically. One of these issues concerns the thresholds definition. This is a key step of the approach, where experts are asked to provide data, which can be subjective and biased. A sensitivity analysis of the thresholds values, similar to mathematical programming for instance, could participate to the industrial risks minimization.