An Approach for Assessing the Applicability of Collaborative Planning Concepts

Today´s business environment is characterized by complex logistics networks which contain multiple actors participating in the provision of products and services. These (potentially) legally independent yet highly inter-dependent companies need to be coordinated in their actions to achieve a high supply chain performance. Thereby, peculiar challenges -- affecting the design of effective coordination mechanisms, e.g. Limited willingness to share sensitive information -- are addressed by current research in supply chain management, especially the promising field of collaborative planning (CP). This paper presents a methodical approach that aims at supporting the design of CP concepts and is grounded on the idea of reusing existing research results by facilitating a systematic transfer of coordination mechanisms between application domains. For a given coordination problem, the applicability of available CP concepts is assessed -- guiding the case-specific design of (potentially) effective solutions. Furthermore, we explicitly present the underlying classification, matching and transfer methods, including an exemplary application.