Customer/Supplier Relationship: reducing Uncertainties in Commercial Offers thanks to Readiness, Risk and Confidence Considerations

Abstract

Nowadays, in customer/supplier relationship, suppliers have to define and evaluate some offers based on customers’ requirements and company’s skills. This offer definition implies more and more some design activities for both technical solution and its delivery process. In the context of Engineering-To-Order, design and engineering activities are more important, the uncertainties on offer characteristics is rather high and therefore, suppliers bid on the calls for tender depending on their feelings. In order to provide suppliers with metrics that enable him/her to know about the confidence level of an offer, we propose a knowledge-based model that includes four original metrics to characterize the confidence level of an offer. The offer overall confidence relies on four indicators: (i) two objectives ones based on Technology Readiness Level and Activity Risk Level, and (ii) two subjective ones based on the supplier’s skills and risks aversion. The knowledge-based model for offer definition, offer assessment and offer confidences is based on a constraint satisfaction problem.