Consultor procurement

12th IFPSM (2006) summer school

Supply Chain Collaborative practices: A supplier perspective
Ya-Ling Tsai The department of Marketing University of Stirling, Scotland, UK. [e-mail]

Introduction
The traditional concept of customer satisfactory requires only a good vertical supply chain between suppliers and its customers. According to this concept, customers maintain loyalty to the companies because by matching customers’ expectation they can provide quick product innovations and offer quality. Since the mid 1990s, a new concept in the supply chain, Supply Chain Management (SCM), emphasises the importance of forming collaboration between suppliers in order to provide an efficient supply chain has attracted attention from both firms and academics. However, SCM has its difficulties: namely, unknown customer expectations, as well as costs and efficiency implications. Due to these difficulties, it makes sense to form collaboration among suppliers, who together, can provide a much better customer service to their customers. Such collaboration enables the suppliers to quickly respond to customer expectations, good product innovations and anticipate customer needs.

The Supply Chain Collaboration
It is a without a doubt that the successful development of SCM performance has to focus on customers’ needs and wants (Chandra and Kumar, 2000; Svensson, 2003). Consequently, the performance of the supply chains can affect customer satisfaction.
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12th IFPSM (2006) summer school

Therefore, the goal of SCM is to meet the needs of customer by supplying the right product at the right place, time, and price. Furthermore, a part from the factor related to customer satisfaction, Lee and Amaral (2002) point to that SCM is anticipated to achieve well on both the costs and services from an operational perspective. That's why the best combination of the constituent has to be found, in order to ensure that the core objective of satisfying customer requirements at the