همکاری تامین زنجیره ای : تاثیر موفقیت در مشارکت های بلند مدت

The effects of collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment in the performance of supply chains have been discussed in the literature. In this research paper, we posit that these effects along with other collaborative factors influence the success of collaboration in supply chains. The objective of this paper is to uncover the impact of collaborative planning, collaborative decision making of supply chain partners and collaborative execution of all supply chain processes in the success of collaboration. We used empirical analysis to validate our research paradigm. Data were obtained through a questionnaire survey of customers of a Textile company. We used confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling (using AMOS). The results of the analysis confirm that the factors of collaboration impact the success of supply chains that will lead to future collaborations. Collaborative execution of supply chain plans will also have an impact on future collaborations. Companies that are interested in supply chain collaborations can consider engaging in long-term collaboration depending on the success of current collaborations. This will help SC partners to make investment decisions particular to collaboration.

Increasingly in the past three decades several companies have established collaborations with other supply chain (SC) partners. Especially after the success story of Wal-Mart's collaboration with upstream suppliers (e.g., P&G), supply chain collaboration has become one of the common norms for many companies around the world (Simchi-Levi et al., 1999). Collaboration encourages all players of SCs to engage in planning, forecasting, replenishment, information sharing, resource sharing and incentive sharing (VICS, 2002, Aviv, 2007, Toktay et al., 2000 and Ramanathan and Muyldermans, 2010). Companies such as West-Marine, Procter & Gamble and Hewlett–Packard have proved the benefits of SC collaborations in terms of reduced cost, improved sales and improved forecast accuracy. ‘Benefit sharing’ is the key element of such SC collaborations (Toktay et al., 2000). Several SC management practices such as Vendor Managed Inventory (Sari, 2008), Efficient Consumer Response (Andraski, 1994), Continuous Replenishment and Accurate response (Fisher et al., 1997) have been suggested in the literature to improve material and information flows in the SCs. With the arrival of the internet, new and hitherto unexpected channels for sharing information have become available to SC players. Given the increasing complexities of information in SCs, and given the increasing sophistication in information technology and the use of the internet, a new SC management tool has emerged in the last few years focussing SC collaboration (VICS, 2002). This new tool is the so called Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR) framework. CPFR was introduced as a pilot project between Wal-Mart and Warner-Lambert in the mid-nineties, aiming to be highly responsive to consumer demand (Ireland and Crum, 2005). This framework exploits computer networking, information technology and other internet based technologies. Some researchers see CPFR as a second generation ECR (Seifert, 2003) to help companies to rapidly respond to consumer demand (Sherman, 1998). Despite the advantages of SC collaboration, many companies do not enter into formal collaborative arrangements due to lack of clear understanding of collaborations and its impact in long-term partnerships of profit earning (Barratt, 2004 and Ramanathan et al., 2011). In the literature on collaborative supply chains, CPFR is classified under three levels such as basic CPFR, developing CPFR and advanced CPFR (Danese, 2007, Larsen et al., 2003 and ECR, Europe, 2002). Accordingly, the basic CPFR is a simple transactional relationship among SC partners. In developing CPFR, demand, order planning, promotional data and production data will be exchanged. In the highest level, advanced CPFR, supply chain partners will have transparent information sharing. The focus of these classifications is mainly on benefits of various elements of SC collaborations, e.g., cost reduction, profit, forecast accuracy and inventory control (Gavirneni et al., 1999, Lee et al., 2000 and Aviv, 2007). Some recent research articles have focussed on the development of SC collaboration models that reflect the latest understanding of collaboration (Cao and Zhang, 2011, Nyaga et al., 2010 and Ramanathan et al., 2011). According to Cao and Zhang (2011), SC collaboration will be beneficial to the parties only when all members in SC cooperate. They named 7 dimensions of collaboration as information sharing, goal congruence, decision synchronisation, incentive alignment, resource sharing, communication and joint knowledge creation. Nyaga et al. (2010) examined the SC relationships in buyer and supplier perspectives. They proved that the collaborative information sharing, joint efforts and investments lead to trust and commitments. Several other researchers insisted the importance of information sharing among SC partners (Forslund and Jonsson, 2007 and Ryu et al., 2009). Byrne and Heavey (2006) highlighted the importance of forecasting and information exchange in capacitated industrial SCs. Most of the articles discussed in the literature have described the benefits and performances of SC collaboration but failed to discuss a comprehensive view of success of SC collaboration and its impact on long-term partnerships. Hence, the objective of this research study is to expose the role of collaboration in the success of SCs and also to see the influence of success in long-term collaboration decisions. To support this study, we use three important key terms of SC collaboration from the existing literature namely collaborative planning, collaborative decision making and collaborative execution in identifying the success of collaborations (Barratt, 2004, Nyaga et al., 2010 and Cao and Zhang, 2011). Various aspects of success of collaboration are further discussed in detail in the next section. We also assess future implications of successful collaborations by examining its impact in long-term partnerships. The rest of this paper is organised as follows. In the next section, we briefly review the literature of resource based view (RBV) and resource dependent theory (RDT) to provide a theoretical foundation and underlying principle for our SC collaboration model. Based on this SC collaboration model we have developed our research hypotheses. Section 3 describes the research methodology, model development and results. Section 4 concludes with our research findings and also discusses possible future research.

The theoretical underpinning of RBV and RDT are foundations for further understanding of success of SC collaborations and long-term partnerships. The relationship between key aspects of SC collaboration (planning, execution and decision making) and success of collaboration is significantly related to each other. A RBV of each company in the SC collaboration collectively enhances the performance of SCs by means of resource dependency on each other. Although collaborative planning, decision making and executive make a significant impact on the success of collaboration, all of them are not influencing the SC partners to be involved in a long-term SC collaborative arrangements. Among all the four constructs, only success of SC collaboration and execution of SC process are encouraging, and persuading the SC partners for future collaborations. This result insists the importance of consistent execution of SC processes to maintain successful performance in SCs and also to extend the current collaboration in future businesses. From this research, it is evident that by ensuring appropriate execution of SC plans, supply chains can enjoy the benefits of sales growth, market share and satisfaction in SCs. Successful SC collaborations with satisfied partners will lead them to continue their future partnerships. Based on the success of current collaborative arrangements, SC partners can decide the level of information exchange and future collaborations. This can also help them to decide the investments in SC collaborations (such as information technology and communications). Analysis of results of this research study indicates that the success of collaboration, by means of supply chain planning, collaborative decision making and execution, indirectly encourage the participating SC members to engage in a long-term collaborative arrangement. This result explicitly reflects the impact of collaborative arrangement in the success of businesses which supports resource dependent theory. Every member of SC imparts their knowledge and expertise in collaborative decision making. Team work and resource sharing explain the success of collaboration. Resource dependent views of each member of SC create trust and confidence in the collaborative SC activities (Nyaga et al., 2010). Improved sales, new projects and customers’ satisfaction express the success of SC collaboration. However, whether the satisfied customers are willing to continue current collaborations? This is not discussed in the literature. One of the main reasons might be SC collaboration practices are still in its infant stage and hence it will take some more time to see its success. The company chosen for this study is in collaborative partnership with its customers for more than 5 years; hence it is possible to see the interest of customers in long-term partnership. The results of the analysis show that the success of collaboration significantly leads to long-term future SC collaborations. While many businesses hesitate to involve a diverse group of SC partners in forming SC collaboration team, the actual benefits on success of collaboration is not known to them. Efforts in bringing all SC partners under one collaborative framework for planning, decision making and execution will assist harmonising specific potential of each member of the team. Success of the SC collaboration will improve the confidence of the SC collaboration partners to improve their performance further to achieve high profit. Thus businesses will try to establish collaborative partnership with the existing partners. This concept of RBV and RDT in SCs is encouraging long-term partnerships. We make two important empirical contributions to the current literature of supply chain collaborations. First, this research establishes that the collaborative practices (such as collaborative planning, collaborative decision making and collaborative execution of SC plans) trigger the high level of success in the collaborative supply chains. Though these three collaborative practices have been discussed in the literature (for example—CPFR framework insists the collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment to ensure improved performance in the SCs), they have not been modelled together. The second important contribution is that the relationship among the constructs—collaborative practices, success of collaboration and long-term future collaborations. Successful SCs need to have planning, decision making and execution as key elements of collaboration. Poor performance in any one of these three key elements will result in failure or short term collaboration. Our results show that the future collaborations are significantly influenced by the success of current SC collaborations. To continue this relationship for a long-term, it is essential to have collaborative SC executions. We can interpret this result in such a way that SCs collaborating for short term benefit may not have sustainable future long-term partnership unless all SC processes are executed collaboratively with the support of other SC partners. The structural model of supply chain collaboration yields practically and statistically valid results to explain the valid significant positive relationships among these three constructs. This result stresses the importance of the collaboration of SC partners to execute the SC processes effectively in order to obtain a sustainable future support from the SC partners. The results of the analysis have not identified any significant relationships among SC planning, SC decision making and future long-term collaborations. The SEM highlights an important aspect of the SC collaboration that the collaborative planning and decision making would not decide the success of SC unless all the plans are executed effectively under collaboration. This is one of the important results in the area of SC collaborations. Based on this result, managers can collaborate with other SC partners to execute the plans to gain success. By assessing the success of current collaboration, the management of the company can decide on future investments in SC collaborations and hence to have a successful long-term collaboration. From mid 1990’s supply chain collaboration has gained many advantages to compete in the market. On the contrary, still there are many companies hesitating to implement CPFR in a confusion of whether they will be benefited of collaboration. The reason for this is the level of investment on technology and collaborative effort. Recent paper of Ramanathan and Muyldermans (2010) used SEM for understanding the demand factors for the purpose of forecasting in collaborative supply chains. Nyaga et al. (2010) used supplier and buyer perspective based evaluation of the performance of collaboration. However, both these papers have not specified how the CPFR and collaborative decision making influence the success of collaboration. In this paper, we establish relationships between collaborative planning, collaborative execution of SC processes, collaborative decision making and the success of collaboration. Further we also test the impact of the success of SC collaboration in long-term future collaborative partnerships. The empirical analysis prove that the satisfaction in collaborative arrangements (such as CPFR) encourage the participating SC members to involve in a long-term future collaborations. This result can help the companies who intend to involve in SC collaborations to make decisions on investment in SC collaborations. This research is a part of our on-going research heading for understanding various SC collaborations in sustainable businesses of 21st century. In this paper, we have considered a case of Textile Company, who is engaged in SC collaboration, to conduct questionnaire survey. We have used the responses of downstream customers of the company. From the analysis of the data, we have identified the impact of CPFR in the success of collaboration. The results of the analysis strongly support the impact of successful collaborations in the long-term SC partnerships. But our research is limited to one particular company with many SC partners. This work can be extended to many companies involved in SC collaboration. Future research can also test the success of collaboration and its impact on future collaboration by involving upstream SC members. This may help the manufacturing companies to decide the level of collaboration.