حمایت از مذاکره برای انجام عملیات ساخت بر اساس سفارش در تجارت الکترونیکی بنگاه به بنگاه

This paper deals with the problem of supporting negotiations among manufacturing firms that operate on a Make To Order (MTO) basis. First, an analytical model of negotiation between a generic customer–supplier pair is presented. Then, the paper proposes a system based upon an intervenor which allows the parties to reach efficient utility-sharing solutions. Results of numerical experiments in an industrial environment are reported.

In many industries, the value chain is fragmented both horizontally and vertically and manufacturing firms operate on a Make to Order basis. In this scenario, firms negotiate on Requests For Quotation (RFQs) issued by customers and upon bids submitted by suppliers. In Make to Order operations, manufacturing activities are strongly order-specific. This reduces the relative importance of inventory planning with respect to the planning of manufacturing capacity. It can therefore be stated that in MTO operations, the commodity being traded consists in production capacity, rather than in physical goods. For both suppliers and customers, the negotiation process will therefore be tightly integrated to production planning, with price and the due date of the order being the main dimensions on which negotiation occurs. The complexity of the negotiation process and its tight relationship to production planning may be considered to be a significant hindrance to the diffusion of business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce. In the absence of appropriate systems which are able to support this crucial process, firms will continue to rely upon human expertise. This constitutes a bottleneck on the number of negotiation processes that can be managed at the same time and does not allow firms to take advantage of all of the trading opportunities that arise from the association to a B2B trading platform or an electronic marketplace. To put it more directly, if the process of order negotiation and production planning must anyway go through the mind of a manager who cannot avail him/herself of an adequate decision-support system, then it would not make a great difference to run the process on a traditional medium such as a telephone. The following section presents some basic concepts of negotiation theory. Section 3 discusses an analytical model of negotiation among a customer–supplier pair who try to agree upon the two dimensions of price and due date. Section 4 presents mathematical programming models that can support customers and suppliers optimise their local production plan in view of negotiation. Finally, Section 5 proposes an intervenor, i.e. a third-party entity that may facilitate negotiations occurring in a single customer-multisupplier environment. Preliminary experiments on the application of an intervenor in an industrial setting are then briefly described.

The paper has discussed the problem of order negotiation upon price and due date among suppliers and customers operating on a MTO basis. The problem has been tackled from the two perspectives of analytical modelling and that of practical decision-support. Concerning the latter, it has shown how the Pareto optimal frontier among two firms may be identified. Furthermore, it has proposed the role of a third-party intervenor that may lead to superior outcomes concerning both the efficiency of the process and effectiveness of the result. This kind of intervenor may be considered to be useful for developing next-generation Business-to-Business trading platforms for electronic commerce. The paper has not covered the fundamental issue of trust and honesty that the firms must have when dealing with the intervenor. This is an obvious precondition if firms must be convinced to release sensitive information such as their utility functions. An important extension of research will therefore be the identification of how changes to the negotiation protocol may on the one hand provide firms with incentives to share information without manipulation and, on the other, may affect the final outcomes of negotiation. A sample of these problems have been provided when discussing the difference between mandatory and non-mandatory agreement rules. Furthermore, it will be important to extend the model to simultaneous negotiations between multiple customers and suppliers on multiple orders.