Addressing the Root Cause Impediments for Supplier Development in Manufacturing Environment

Abstract

The manufacturing supply chains, designed for delivering the best to the customer should operate by following systems approach, where planning and execution are strategically carried out protecting the interests of each stakeholder. Supplier Development (SD) is one such sourcing strategy that a manufacturing company devise to strengthen its critical but fragile supply base, portraying mutual interests in the formulation. However in reality, many companies even though capable enough in conceiving and materializing their SD strategies yet, are miserably falling short off due to tremendous misdirected flow of resources. Often, the bitter experiences from the results due to misdirected SD efforts, the companies are pushed to draw wrong conclusions and inevitably search for other misdirected efforts without addressing the root cause impediments. In concrete, the misdirection in SD has its deep roots along various tangible and intangible issues of the operation field. Therefore, a manufacturer needs to bring these issues to the surface, critically analyze and uproot them for smooth development of its supply base strength. In this paper, a methodology is proposed using Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) - Fuzzy Matriced Impacts Croises Multiplication Appliqueeaun Classement (FMICMAC) algorithm for systematic analysis of impediments of SD. To demonstrate its utility, a case study was conducted in an Indian manufacturing company and the proposed methodology is applied to it in order to explain the salient features of the concept.