Supply Chain Collaboration

Collaboration is the key to success to companies especially in supply chain industry. However, the problem is a adaption of collaboration tools. The main challenge is how to make end users use the social media tools consistently. Since there are not many employees who engage in these collaboration tools, there is vicious cycle. According to the supplychainquarterly.com, it identified six essential steps for successful supply chain collaboration.

The first step for successful collaboration is to maximize strengths rather than minimizing weaknesses. Once a company identifies the strengths, it needs to figure out the followings: Is top management committed to the collaboration process? Does information technology (IT) support enough to facilitate a collaboration tool? Furthermore, finding values of collaboration tools and delivering them to customers is an important step. Partners should have a strategy that implements collaboration tools internally. Without having specific guidelines, collaboration tools are more likely to be unsuccessful.

Figure 1. Collaborative Performance System

Lastly, sustainability for collaboration tools is important. Although using collaboration tools is advantageous to end users, if they do not keep engaging in the collaboration tool, quality of contents and number of users will decrease. To prevent this situation, I think they need to provide reward programs. There is collaborative performance systems (see the Figure 1). Incentive alignment encourages users to reveal information by facilitating incentive status visibility.


Source: http://www.supplychainquarterly.com/topics/Strategy/20120622-six-steps-to-successful-supply-chain-collaboration/