Supply chain collaboration : a case study in textile industry

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1083556 (Table of Contents)

Supply chain management (SCM) system is an integrated and collaborative network of suppliers, factories, warehouses, distribution centers, and retailers, through which the whole chain of logistic processes is managed for a fast and flexible coordination between a company, its customers and suppliers within the chain. Among the members of supply chain, "collaboration," which is based on "sharing" sense - like information sharing, resource sharing, risk sharing and activity sharing - plays a critical role to implement an effective SCM. So, an increasing number of companies subscribe to the idea that developing long-term collaboration, cooperation and partnership, can take significant wastes out of the supply chain and provide a route for securing the best commercial advantage. However, the implementation of partnering involves radical changes, which can demand considerable work and is hard to implement. At this point, collaborative networks of enterprises, such as Tekstil Terbiye Teknolojileri A.S. (3T), have a crucial role to enable those enterprises to respond to consumer demand more quickly, integrate with suppliers more effectively, adapt to market variations more efficiently, and evolve product designs with manufacturing practices more seamlessly. Certainly, performance evaluation of this collaboration is very important for gaining and maintaining competitive advantage. Consequently, this thesis "Supply Chain Collaboration: A Case Study In Textile Industry" aims to investigate the current collaboration architecture of this network and to generate appropriate collaboration performance metrics for a convenient performance measurement system. Thus, performance of this collaborative system can be assessed in terms of these metrics to identify the improvement areas of the system.