Design concept for a transparent supply chain

Abstract

The production companies have been concentrating increasingly on their own core-competencies while outsourcing their secondary production processes at the same time. Apart from the advantage of efficiency, however, this strategy leads to an increase in inter-company distribution of labor resulting in a strong dependence on reliable supply relationships. Consequently, closer co-operations in form of supply chains have to be set up in order to cope with the mutual dependencies of the supply chain processes. The article deals with this subject and proposes a solution concept for the design of supply chains. The solution concept is divided into four stages and enables the production companies to govern and control the complexity and transparency of their supply chains.