A Set of Criteria for Supply Chain Design

Abstract

A “supply chain” is a network of production and distribution services which, connected through cooperation agreements, perform the functions of procurement of materials, transformation of them into intermediate and finished products, and finally distribution of final products to customers. “Integration” seems to be the new paradigm in organizing business lines, and “supply chain management” to be the related organization approach which could help in managing interactions among concurrent firms as well as marketing. But supply chains reveal to be complex systems, and their management a really complex task in which cooperation of several services together and their finalization to common industrial goals need methods and procedures still to be either developed or, at least, widely validated. The aim of this contribution is to propose some suggestions for the design and the organization of a new supply chain, such to make several SMEs able to operate together after a very short transient. To this aim a set of simple criteria for driving the supply chain design has to be made available for SME managers: their main scope will be to give simply-computable a-priori estimation of the convenience, for an enterprise, to stipulate an agreement for being included into a supply chain.