Strategic Supply Chain Design for a New Market Opportunity from Qualified Partner Sets
Résumé
This paper addresses the problem of supply chain design at the strategic level when production/distribution of a new market opportunity has to be launched among a set of qualified partners. The new market opportunity is characterized by a deterministic forecast over a planning horizon. The product (or service) is assumed to be produced (or provided) in a fixed sequence of some distinct stages or echelons, and each stage could have a number of qualified partners. The qualified partners at each stage might be different factories (or service organization) of the same corporation or different organizations that have agreed to participate in an open supply web. We assume that the partners under consideration are equally capable at their respective processing stage (possibly through a pre-processing evaluation for the new opportunity), but the partners may differ in available capacities and costs, given their current workloads. The objective is to design the supply chain by selecting one partner from each stage to meet the forecasted demand without backlog and optimize fixed alliance related and variable production and logistics costs over the given planning horizon. A solution algorithm is developed based on key properties of the problem, and is tested on empirical data sets. The overall contribution is an analytical tool that can be employed by the coordinator of the new market opportunity at the strategic level for designing supply chains based on integrated cost concerns.