Supply Chains: A Manager's Guide

Winning Through Collaboration

Although supply chain management has come a long way from its origins in transportation management, the discipline still tends to reflect the original focus on managing the flow of goods across a single link in the chain. As the examples in this chapter illustrate, it is all too easy for such point solutions to simply push problems up or down the chain rather than actually solving them. Even when two or more trading partners cooperate to improve their overall position, they often do so at the expense of other members of the chain. In game theory terms, they are creating a local positive-sum game, but their cooperative relationship may actually drive their interactions with other members of the chain into the lose-lose ...