Supply Chain Collaboration Characterization

Abstract

While individual success stories of supply chain collaboration have been reported, mainstream implementation has been much less successful than expected. Many collaborative relationships fail to meet the participants’ expectations and few firms have truly capitalized on the potential of supply chain collaboration . In the literature, the exact nature and attributes of supply chain collaboration are not well understood and consistently defined. By highlighting the need for communication and joint knowledge creation as critical variables that are overlooked previously, we comprehensively define supply chain collaboration as seven interweaving components of information sharing, goal congruence, decision synchronization, incentive alignment, resources sharing, collaborative communication , and joint knowledge creation. In this chapter, we conceptualize supply chain collaboration by combining two streams of literature of process focus and relationship focus. We further define and elaborate each of the seven dimensions of supply chain collaborations.