Performance management in collaborative networks: Difficulties and barriers

Abstract

Global competitiveness obliges to enterprises to collaborate in many processes such as new product and services development in order to shorten the lifecycle, development and commercialization. Therefore, the competence has drifted from an individual focus to a supply chain management one and, from some years, to a collaborative enterprises network approach. It is common to find frameworks for measuring/managing the performance within extended enterprises, supply chains, virtual enterprises, etc. However, few authors deal with a higher level: the collaborative networks one. This concept of enterprises management set up bigger difficulties regarding not only from a conceptual and structural point of view but also considering both the design and posterior development of systems capable of managing the performance achieved in this type of organizations. This work describes both the main difficulties and barriers when trying to apply performance management concepts to collaborative networks. In this sense, it is highlighted the weaknesses of the existing intra-organizational frameworks that cannot be projected, as they are conceived, to manage performance within collaborative networks. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.