Supporting the strategies alignment process in collaborative networks

Abstract

The establishment of collaborative relationships with the network partners provides them important advantages, such as competitiveness and agility, when responding to the current rapid market evolutions. Nonetheless, the participation in collaborative networks becomes a complex process that starts with the alignment of all the enterprises’ objectives and strategies. Smart systems and approaches are needed in order support collaborative partners to deal with the strategies alignment challenge. The lack of alignment emerges because each enterprise defines its own objectives and strategies, to perform their business, and it could happen that non-compatible strategies are activated, involving the appearance of conflicts between strategies of different enterprises. To this regard, a decision support system is proposed, consisting of a mathematical model, a system dynamics method, a simulation tool and a guideline, with the main aim of supporting the process of identifying aligned strategies, among the enterprises of the collaborative network.