Decision-Making Coordination within Three- Echelon Supply Chains

In today’s globalized context, enterprise management becomes more and more difficult to master. Market evolution has driven the enterprises to create strategic alliances with both their suppliers and their clients. Since more than a decade ago, it has been widely accepted that market competition is not anymore between the enterprises themselves, but between the supply chains they belong to (Lee and Billington, 1995; Núñez-Muñoz and Montoya-Torres, 2009). The management of such supply chains is concerned with the management of material, information and financial flows, in which coordination and integration of these flows within and across companies are critical (Breiter et al., 2009). Coordination is hence a core requirement in supply chain management. According to Simatupang et al. (2002), cited by Breiter et al. (2009), the state of coordination in a supply chain can be understood as “an act of properly combining (relating, harmonizing, adjusting, ABSTRACT