Autor: Josef Oehmen

The increasing globalization gives western companies great new opportunities. Especially China gained increasing importance as a sourcing market in the last years. Despite these opportunities, a retreat of many companies from China could be witnessed recently. Among other factors, this is due to the fact that western companies cannot exert enough influence on the performance and price of their suppliers. This article presents tools and processes to successfully face this challenge and improve the own position of power as a customer.

The increasing competitive pressure leads to a reduction of the depth of value creation and therefore to a rising importance of suppliers. Additionally, globalization is the cause for a tighter international network in production. Asymmetries in interests can obstruct a cooperation between companies and may endanger the commercial success. The article describes asymmetries in interests in the cooperation with local as well as Chinese suppliers.

In Supply Chain Management, the coordination of information-, material- and value streams is of central importance. One possible approach is the Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment Model. In this article, the most important success factors from the areas of data quality, product structure, producer, customer and human factors are presented. A graphical method for assessing efforts and benefits, as well as optimizing the cost-benefit ratio, is presented. The method is verified based on an application example from industry.