Improving supply chain performance by Supplier Development program through enhanced visibility

Abstract

Established collaborative relationship with supplier in form of Supplier Development (SD) has gained ample popularity among manufacturing organizations due to significant benefits in product development time, capacity utilization, product quality and manufacturing cost. Sometime, slender supply chain is a result of extensive SD program at multiple stages of a value chain. The leaner the supply chain lesser the time to respond the market change and other uncertainty. The increasing uncertainty because of market dynamics creates the new panorama of visibility issue where the existence of proper visibility deliver a seamless operation in supply chain performance, but its absence create havoc in entire value chain. In presence of SD where the supply chain is leaner, the visibility is a significant governing issue which can produce all the disadvantages of SD, if not dealt properly. In this paper, an attempt is made to address the criteria and their orientations those govern the supply chain performance through visibility under the presence of a well-defined SD. An Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) method is used to get a structural framework in a case environment.