A cooperative system to support inventory leveling negotiations

In many cases, deviations between actual product and service demands and their forecasts are inevitable, creating an excess of products and service. To deal with that excess, it is important that logistics professionals elaborate strategies for discovering potential and repressed demands. Traditional techniques to manage inventories do not suffice to reach all expected results. In this context, strategies for products and service excess destination are also promoted, in order to optimize application of organizational resources. Negotiation between the party holding excess and the potentially demanding party is a crucial issue in the excess destination activity. This is a process in which two distinct parties search for a consensus regarding their interests and objectives, trying to satisfy both expectations. Thus, it is fundamental to establish mechanisms that stimulate communication and motivation during the negotiation process, as well as the ability for decision-making, conflict management and reaching an agreement. Therefore, cooperation may be the best type of negotiation. Cooperation helps to establish points in common that favor the negotiation, and information sharing and consensus building plays a key role in this process. In this work, we present a system to support cooperative negotiations aiming at leveling inventory of products and services used by different processes, stimulating the integration among them. The system is used by several agencies within Brazilian Federal Government Defense Ministry, acting as a market for excess capacity of services and goods. The proposed environment facilitates system users to cooperate towards achieving common objectives in the negotiation.