ساختارهای برون سپاری و جریان اطلاعات در زنجیره تامین سه لایه

We consider a three-tier supply chain consisting of an original equipment manufacturer (OEM), a contract manufacturer (CM) and a supplier. We analyze and compare three outsourcing structures that are currently implemented by top-tier OEMs: (1) inhouse consignment, under which the OEM signs independent contracts with the CM and the supplier; (2) turnkey with integration, under which the OEM contracts with an alliance of the CM and the supplier; and (3) turnkey, under which the OEM contracts with the CM, and the CM then subcontracts with the supplier. The OEM is a Stackelberg leader who decides how much of the end product to produce. All parties use take-it-or-leave-it wholesale-price contracts. Both the CM and the supplier have private information about their own production costs. The OEM has prior information about these costs, but this prior information depends on the specific outsourcing structure. Each party's optimal decision is characterized. We then compare each party's profits across the three outsourcing structures and identify which benefits and when.

Today's advanced information, communication and transportation technologies, as well as the increasingly open global economy, are providing unprecedented opportunities for companies to outsource more of their traditional business activities. For example, computer makers and other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), such as Motorola, IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) and Dell Computers, which traditionally produced inhouse, now often outsource their production to contract manufacturers (CMs). By so doing, these OEMs hope to better focus on their core competencies, such as product design and marketing. They also expect to enjoy cost savings due to the CMs’ economies of scale and flexibility. However, production outsourcing is also risky: what is being outsourced also involves tacit knowledge and supplier relationships, which may eventually hurt the competitive advantage of the OEM. Many OEMs have learned this lesson the hard way and have started to restructure their outsourcing arrangements so as to have more control over supplier relationships. According to Carbone (2004), Wolfgang Zenger, vice president of HP's global procurement services group, said that in the 1990s HP outsourced a lot of its strategic purchasing and manufacturing to electronics manufacturing services (EMS), which proved to be a mistake: “We had given too much control to contract manufacturers”, he said. HP lost a lot of visibility in the supply chain because its relationships with suppliers were not as tight as they should have been. “So we took some control back in house through the buy-sell process”, he said. For more examples of different outsourcing arrangements, see Amaral et al. (2006).

In this paper, we investigate three outsourcing structures in a three-tier supply chain consisting of an OEM, a CM and a supplier: consignment, integration and turnkey. We first obtain the equilibrium wholesale prices under the one-period setting and examine the impact of the OEM's prior information about other parties’ costs on those wholesale prices. We then extend the study to a two-period scenario. We discuss how to update the cost information between the periods and demonstrate how to derive the corresponding perfect Bayesian equilibria. Finally, we conduct a numerical study to explore the ratchet effects under different structures. Without information difference, and with an example of the power function distributions of costs, we illustrate that the wholesale price offered by the OEM for each semi-product is the same under integration and turnkey. When the OEM has a low estimation of the CM's and supplier's costs, the wholesale price it offers for each semi-product is also the same under consignment and integration. However, when this estimation is high, the OEM tends to offer a lower wholesale price under integration than under consignment. We show that the OEM is always better off under integration than under consignment or turnkey. This is because integration mitigates double marginalization. We then characterize the sensitivity of the prior information on wholesale prices. We find that, under integration, as long as the OEM has stochastically larger prior in the reversed hazard rate order, the wholesale price it offers will be higher. However, under turnkey, the conditions prompting the OEM to offer a higher price are stronger. From this analysis, we conclude that credible information sharing between the OEM and the CM is not possible without a suitable mechanism. We note that there exist several research work along this direction such as Kaya and Özer (2009) and Kayis et al. (2007).