Value-Based Management of Supplier Relationships and Supply Contracts

Supplier relationship managers often find it difficult to evaluate and optimize supplier relationships, which are crucial to the success of their business yet complex and multifaceted, characterized by long-term orientation, uncertainty, temporal evolution, idiosyncratic investment, improvement potential, and adaptation flexibility. How to design optimal supply contracts to govern supplier relationships has been a common problem in business practice for many years. This book draws on the modern theories of investment under uncertainty in the finance literature and proposes a hierarchical, dynamic and value-based solution for supplier relationship and supply contract management.

At the strategic level, the author addresses supplier relationship management by putting forward a three-layer relationship valuation procedure and a fuzzy-stochastic relationship valuation model. In addition, decision models for managing a supplier relationship life cycle as well as configuring and planning supplier relationship portfolios are presented.

At the tactical level, the author deals with supply contract management. A general, compound supply contract model is proposed and how to design optimal supply contracts under demand risk and price risk is explored. Furthermore, the contract portfolio configuration problem is discussed.