Customer–supplier relationship management in an intelligent supply chain network

Abstract

Outsourcing is leading to more and more complex industrial organisations. This can be attributed to the fact that several decision centres interact. As a consequence, changes in customer–supplier relationships can be noticed. In recent years, these relations have strongly evolved to lead to better internal management of each partner and a better general performance to satisfy customers. These evolutions created a new approach to the relationship between companies, called ‘industrial partnership’, in the form of a network. Networks induce a need at customer–supplier relation control level. The contribution and participation of each of the partners are thus fundamental to make supply chain management (SCM) a successful project. The control system of each actor partner must thus be adaptable enough to satisfy the production requirements. Our contribution to the improvement of customer–supplier relationship is a decentralised self-organised control model based on the concept of holon. In this model, the decision system manages a group of actors’ operations who are in a partnership. In this paper in particular a process for the evaluation of the suppliers network is discussed.