فرایند تحلیل شبکه برای مدیریت مشترک درون سازمانی : یک مطالعه موردی در شبکه های سرمایه گذاری مشترک

In the last years, collaboration among enterprises has gained attention in the business environment as a means to remain competitive. Enterprises that are collaborating look for improving their performance but, in real assessments, they often do not establish efficient frameworks to structure and manage the enterprise association/inter-enterprise performance. In addition, there are many factors that act as barriers to effective collaboration and have to be also properly managed as they impact on the inter-enterprise performance. This paper provides a methodology based on the analytic network process (ANP) to identify and measure, under an integrated approach, both factors and inter-enterprise performance considering their reciprocal impact. With this innovative approach, enterprises will obtain significant information for the decision-making process regarding which are the factors and inter-enterprise performance elements that generate a higher impact and therefore have a high priority within the specific collaborative relationship. Thus, enterprises can focus their efforts on improving those most important factors and performance elements, and consequently, enhancing their competitiveness.

Enterprise collaboration has been one of the most used business models to compete and adapt to market requirements. Simatupang and Sridharan (2002) define supply chain collaboration as ‘two or more companies working together to create a competitive advantage and higher profits than can be achieved by acting alone’. These companies are actively working together towards common objectives and share information, knowledge, risks and profits (Mentzer, 2001). Enterprises that are collaborating look for improving their performance in different aspects such as increased inventory turnover, increased revenues, cost reductions, product availability, and economic value added (Fawcett, Magnan, & McCarter, 2008). However, enterprises that desire to collaborate or are collaborating often do not establish efficient mechanisms to manage the performance of the enterprise association, called global or inter-enterprise performance, which can be measured, and therefore, managed through performance measurement elements (objectives, performance indicators, etc.). In these contexts, it is important to define inter-enterprise performance elements in order to lead the activities of all the members towards the achievement of the commonly agreed objectives (Alfaro et al., 2009, Bititci et al., 2005 and Verdecho et al., 2009). Thus, it is important for those enterprises to define and use a structured performance measurement framework that allows managing performance under various perspectives or dimensions so that they provide a relevant overview of their performance status. One of the most important performance frameworks developed in the academic literature and business applications is the balanced scorecard (BSC) by Kaplan and Norton (1992). In fact, the BSC, developed initially for managing performance of enterprises, has been extended by different authors for inter-enterprise performance management such as the works by Brewer and Speh, 2000, Bititci et al., 2005 and Folan and Browne, 2005 or Alfaro, Ortiz and Rodríguez (2007). Despite the benefits of collaboration, there are many factors that act as barriers to effective collaboration (Fawcett et al., 2008): lack of top management support, cross-functional conflicts, lack of trust, etc. In fact, many collaborative initiatives that initially were developed to improve the competitiveness of the enterprises, fail due to these factors (Bititci et al., 2007, Kampstra et al., 2006 and Sabath and Fontanella, 2002). For that reason, it is important to manage those factors as they impact on the resulting performance. In addition, the achievement or not achievement of the performance element targets impact on the factors, configuring a system of reciprocal influences between factors and performance elements. For example, the achievement of one financial objective, e.g. increase profitability, impacts on trust, one of the most relevant factors widely analyzed in the literature. At the same time, trust among members impacts on increasing profitability, and thus, a reciprocal relationship between trust and increasing profitability objective is established. On the other hand, both factors and inter-enterprise performance elements are linked among themselves at the internal level. Therefore, it is needed to develop a proposal that identifies and measures the factors and inter-enterprise performance elements under an integrated manner and make explicit the overall real influences that exist within the system so that accurate and significant results are obtained. This proposal should address some questions in order to manage effectively collaborative relationships (Busi and Bititci, 2006 and Simatupang and Sridharan, 2005): What are the relevant factors of collaborative relationships? How can these factors be associated to a performance measurement framework? How are these factors and performance elements linked together? How should both factors and performance elements be measured? etc. From a methodological point of view, it is important to select an adequate method to solve this issue. Suwignjo, Bititci, and Carrie (2000) suggest that integrating the multidimensional effects of factors on performance into a single unit of measurement can only be done through subjective, individual or group judgment. An example of this fact is the valuation of the trade-off between trust and performance. There are not measures that can objectively deal with this issue. For that reason, subjective measurement is widely accepted in Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) to deal with multi-criteria problems (Suwignjo et al., 2000). MCDA comprises a large variety of methods. One of the most extensively method used is ANP introduced by Saaty (1996). There are three main reasons that suggest using ANP to model and solve the problem of this paper. First, ANP allows modeling complex problems with a network structure integrating interdependences and feedback among elements. Second, ANP is adequate to solve problems with both qualitative and quantitative factors (Peniwati, 2007). This is important as many of the collaboration factors are qualitative such as cultural factors, and many of the methods are developed solely for quantitative measurement. Third, ANP has been used in group-decision problems (Erdoğmuş et al., 2005 and Levy and Taji, 2007), which is the case of a collaborative relationship. The aim of this paper is to provide a methodology based on ANP that aids to make decisions to enterprises that collaborate by identifying and measuring, under an integrated approach, both factors and inter-enterprise performance elements considering their reciprocal and internal relationships. The structure of this paper is as follows. Firstly, a literature review regarding relevant factors of collaborative relationships and the application of ANP for performance measurement are analyzed. Secondly, the methodology developed is described. Then, the application of the methodology to a case study is exposed. Finally, conclusions and research implications are presented.

This study has developed a methodology for managing relevant factors on collaborative relationships and performance elements under an integrated approach. This approach solves the limitations of the literature that deal with collaboration relationships where it is observed a lack of mechanisms that allow managing the complexity of these contexts. Also, it is necessary to jointly manage factors and performance elements considering their reciprocal impact as well as their internal dependences as the overall existing influences may affect final results. In the literature, various works suggest that both factors and performance elements are linked together. In other words, changes in one of the factors cause variations on other factors and performance elements. The same case happens if changes occur in one of the performance elements. However, there is not an approach developed that aims to manage collaborative relationships and makes explicit this global network of influences. Thus, this proposal, on the one hand, structures those factors under a solid framework and, on the other hand, it associates this framework to a balanced and coherent performance structure such as the BSC for inter-enterprise contexts. In addition, from a methodological point of view, enterprises need tools to aid decision-making that introduce these aspects as well as their implementation. Therefore, it is developed a methodology that guide this process by structuring, in an ordered manner, the steps to be followed for an adequate and efficient definition of all the elements. Also, it provides two types of analysis for examining final results within a global or partial overview focusing the attention on the factor and performance elements that have a high priority for the collaborative context. The methodology is applicable to all types of inter-enterprise associations taking into account that the performance elements definition will change depending on the specific context analyzed. In addition, some specific collaborative relationships may consider other factors, e.g. industry specific factors. Modification and adaptations to be performed for these two reasons will enable to use this approach in other collaborative relationships. The information coming from this study may be used for other managing purposes such as budget allocations depending on priority of performance objectives and factors. Other interesting research line is to integrate the collaborative performance objectives with the individual enterprise objectives within an overall model. Therefore, future studies will extend further this work.