Collaborative Planning in Supply Chains

This book deals with collaborative planning, an approach to supply chain planning which aims to coordinate planning tasks of independent supply chain partners while respecting their local decision authority. It gives an introduction to collaborative planning, shows how it is embedded in the broader subject matter of supply chain management, and reviews findings of related literature. At its core, it provides a step-by-step description of a negotiation-based, practice-oriented approach to collaborative planning at the medium-term level of master planning between two supply-chain partners, a supplier and a single customer. Subsequently, this basic concept is extended to cover supply chains with multiple partners and planning on a rolling basis. Implications of collaborative planning on supply contracts are sketched out, and incentives for cooperative behavior by the supply-chain partners are analyzed by applying concepts of game theory.