Collaborative Planning in Customer-Oriented Supplier Networks - The CoReNet Approach

Abstract

Due to the dramatic change of the market competition for industrial manufacturers, especially in TCFI (Textile,Clothing and Footwear Industry), in the recent past due to the globalization and consequent openness of the markets together with the financial crisis, there is an increased need of networked collaborative approaches and tools. This pressing need of collaboration allows SMEs (small medium enterprises) to compete in open markets with increased responsiveness in developing and providing new complex and high configurable products and services. This paper presents a new collaborative aggregated planning approach for supplier networks, where groups of SMEs collaborate in the formation of the network, the definition of the operations plan, reply to customer inquiries and release of individual production orders for each unit in the network. The proposed approach promotes the production plan definition through collaborative negotiation and rough capacity checking validation.