Towards a Reference Model for the Identification of Strategic Supply Chains for Value Bundles

Enterprises search intensely to the avoidance of low pricing strategies for new ways to differ in a global market competition. Value bundles offer a promising response as a possibility to expand existing offers of independent products and service into an integrated problem solving for specific customer requirements. This differentiation strategy leads to a rising dependence between the offering enterprise and his suppliers. Strategic supply networks (SSN) offer enterprises the possibility to realize sustainable added value in the creation, deployment and disposal of such integrated solutions. Modeling of SSN encloses the main functions identification, evaluation and choice of supply networks for a specific demand of a value bundle. In this article we provide a reference model for the identification of SSN for value bundles. Therefore we evaluated existing reference models for the strategic sourcing of goods and services and identified lacking issues for the specific needs for value bundles. The derived model is evaluated by applying it to selected case studies.