Towards A System-Based Model For Overall Performance Evaluation In A Supply Chain Context

Abstract

The paper deals with the wide issue of overall performance expression of a system made of interacting entities. Formal aspects of overall performance expression are considered as a first step of this reflection in the context of supply chains (SC's). Indeed, a SC being a network of interconnected business entities, it is proposed to consider it as a system of systems. Because system behavior depends on process dynamics, the performance of any company of the SC highly depends on the performance of its processes. However, while process performance is clearly defined in the literature, performance of complex systems or systems of systems is more difficult to assess due to process interactions. The overall performance concept is usually unsatisfactory either for each company or for the whole SC. To express such performance in SC's, recent proposals have focused on the performance of the prime manufacturer. This performance being linked to the ones of the suppliers, the impact of supplier performances on the prime manufacturer performance has to be integrated. It is therefore proposed to respectively use the SCOR model for describing the involved sub-system processes and, from a computational point of view, to use the MAUT (Multi Attribute Utility Theory) MACBETH methodology to consistently compute the expected performances. More specifically, the Choquet integral is used as the aggregation opera- tor to handle interactions between systems and processes. The case of a bearings manufacturer is used to illustrate the pro- posal for a supplier selection problem.