B2B networks: Select, control and improve the critical customer-supplier relationships

Global trends and developments are leading to fundamental changes in the way single enterprises and networks are managed, controlled and improved. The globalization, the continuous reduction of the product life cycles and the awareness of environmental aspects are interesting the SMEs more and more, pushing towards radical redesign of their structure and boundaries. On one side, the internal process optimization is not sufficient anymore to preserve the competitive advantages, since the competitive challenge is becoming more and more an “extended challenge”, moving from the field of single companies to that of networks of companies, composed by a multitude of collaborative partners which collaborate under a number of different business paradigms (B2B networks, Virtual Enterprise, etc.). On the other side, more and more agility, flexibility and reconfigurability capabilities in the short time are needed to manufacture extended products as well as manage more and more complex business networks. The knowledge support, the consideration of the all product life cycle (from preliminary design to reutilization and disposal), the analysis of the network as a whole and the optimization of each link, should be the main priorities of modern companies. The methodology proposed in this paper starts from these assumptions and dwells on the need of identifying the critical relationships of a basic Customer/Supplier (C/S) interaction, with an exhaustive and objective method, so to be applied independently of the modality as well as the complexity of the business collaboration. Awareness of critical relationships is indispensable to identify a complete set of Performance Indicators (PIs) and the right corrective actions for the improvement and control of a complex business network.