Identifying Buyer-Supplier Conflict in Collaborative Process New Product Development

Every organizational entity, whether operated for profit or not, must purchase goods and/or contract for services to meet the needs of its customers, clients, and stakeholders. As a result of the dynamics that occur in this process, the potential for buyer-supplier conflict is extremely high and is in fact a very common occurrence. Proper identification, assessment, and management of buyer-supplier conflict can lower the cost of conflict and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of an alliance. The costs associated with buyer-supplier conflict include lost productivity, strained relationships, poor resource utilization, and unfulfilled potential of the joint activities undertaken by the buyer and supplier in support of the relationship. This paper applying a methodology, extending the concept of TRIZ (XTriz), to discover supply chain conflict before they occur and cause detrimental effects to system performance. The approach involves specifically focus on extending TRIZ with Root Conflict Analysis, which allows us to extract and map the contradictions arising in supply chain that are the root cause of certain problems. We applied the proposed methodology on new product development (NPD) to illustrate the validity of the tool. Although, further research is needed to fully explore this method of conflict detection, we believe that this research does indeed provide some much needed insight into the daunting task of conflict discovery and therefore proactive handling of these potentially negative occurrences in the supply chain.