Collaborative planning in customer-oriented supplier networks - The CoReNet approach

Due to the dramatic change of the market competition for industrial manufacturers - especially in TCFI (Textile, Clothing and Footwear Industry) - in the recent past resulting from the globalization and consequent openness of the markets together with the financial crisis, resulted in an increased need of networked collaborative approaches and tools. This pressing need of collaboration among SMEs (small medium enterprises) is changing the overall strategic approaches of the companies in the way they address the market demand. Company managers are realizing that in order to compete in open markets with increased responsiveness, they need to develop and provide new, complex and high configurable products and services supported in fully functional collaborative networks. This paper presents a new collaborative aggregated planning approach for supplier networks, where groups of SMEs collaborate in the formation of the network, the definition of the operations plans, in replying to customer inquiries and the release of individual production orders for each unit in the network. The proposed approach promotes the definition of multi-criteria evaluated production plans through collaborative negotiation and individual capacity checking validation.