Drivers and Resistors for Supply Chain Collaboration

Abstract

Due to a constantly growing competition among organizations and higher customer expectations, in the last decades companies started to realize the need for supply chain collaboration (SCC). Although the idea of SCC may sound easy in theory, SCCs in practice often fail. This can be explained by the fact that for a specific SCC a huge amount of drivers and resistors has to be taken into account by all parties involved. However, these drivers and resistors are often unknown or misunderstood by the parties, which leads to the fact that SCCs likely fail. To avoid this, we present a framework which provides a complete overview and the correct understanding of all possible drivers and resistors identified through an extensive literature review. The completeness of the framework in practice is investigated through interviews with companies. In theory, usually dyadic relationships are observed. The companies we interviewed participated in triangular relationships or in SCCs where evenmore than three parties were involved. Preliminary results indicate that even for these more complex relationships in practice the framework is complete.