Analysing challenges of collaborative supply chain strategies in the environment of cross-company networks

A large number of cross-company network collaborations fail to get their intended effect due to wrongly designed organisation form and business relationship aspects. This was the motivation to establish the project " Organisational concepts for the planning and control of supply chains" within the Collaborative Research Center 559: Modelling of Large Logistics Networks. (SFB559 2006), working on the relationship of organisation forms to the supply chain management (SCM) strategies in a crossorganisational network, in order to reach aspired enterprise and network costs as well as performance goals. Scm strategy in this context is understood as a collaborative inter-enterprise stratey e.g.vendor-managed inventory or supply chain monitoring. The implication for collaborative SCM strategies and their impacts on the companies in the network are analysed. The aim of the project is to create procedures for the implementation of SCM strategies in cross-organisational networks and consequently to faciliate the collabration in such networks. To do so, the research project aims at developing four frameworks, in order to describe, explain, predict and design organisation forms and SCM strategies. The first result, namely a description framework, will be presented in this paper. The main literature, adressed within this field of research is organisation management, logistics management and supply chain management.