Foreword 'Time flies when you're having fun', is a remarkable proverb. Looking back on this past year, I can certainly state that time did play some tricks on me. However boring software engineering may seem to outsiders, I truly had a lot of fun in dealing with the challenges we were confronted with. And, as the saying goes; time was flying fast indeed. I would sincerely like to thank all of m...

This paper analyses data from surveys of 1400 first-tier automotive suppliers in Europe, the United States and Japan, conducted as part of MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program. The paper shows that the nature of supplier relations in the three regions is converging in some respects towards closely-linked voice relationships. The diffusion of voice relationships in Europe and the USA appear...

Six sigma is understood as a technique for the continuous improvement in process quality; however, it has been rarely scientifically analysed small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). SMEs representthe vast majority of throughout economies contribute to automotive supply chains various tier ranks. As are known lack resources skills while focusing on short-term benefits rather than long-term g...

Strategic evaluation and supplier selection, or strategic supply, is a main subject of supply chain management. Strategic evaluation and supplier selection is a multi-criteria decision problem, considering both tangible and intangible criteria and organizations are seeking various and sometimes opposite objectives in purchasing from suppliers. As the increasing rivalry in Iran’s auto industry, ...

With the popularity of commercial use of the Internet and WWW, business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce and e-procurement are moving corporate purchasing to the Web. Basically, there are two types of B2B e-commerce business models. Extranets connect the buyer and its suppliers with a closed network. In contrast, electronic markets create open networks for buyer and supplier interactions. Extensive ...

Resulting from divergent business environments between actors, the integration of base pyramid (BoP) into formal supply chain (SC) structures is often hampered by institutional voids, which can result in emergence paradoxical situations. This paper analyzes potential supplier development (SD) for addressing BoP inclusion paradox. The study develops a framework based on assumption that SD enable...

Most studies on Japanese supplier-automaker relationships have focused on the nature of the dyadic inter-firm relationship and the performance of the assembler. We examine the relationship between a Japanese supplier’s “customer scope strategy” (i.e. number of customers) and the supplier’s performance. By analyzing data on 125 suppliers, we found that a supplier with broad automotive customer s...

This paper presents a fuzzy decision-making approach to deal with a clustering supplier problem in a supply chain system. During recent years, determining suitable suppliers in the supply chain has become a key strategic consideration. However, the nature of these decisions is usually complex and unstructured. In general, many quantitative and qualitative factors, such as quality, price, and fl...

The purpose of this paper is to find out current supplier development practices employed by different organization. Paper mainly focuses on supplier development, supplier development activities, programs, critical elements and beneficial move by buyer. Importance of relationship development and factors responsible for it long with current gaps in this field is discussed in brief.

supplier selection is one of the most critical activities of purchasing management in supply chain and managers increasingly face sourcing decisions of how to selected suppliers. this paper illustrates the development of a sourcing decision that provides support for the buyer firm in supply chain.the models developed here, involved selecting between single and dual sourcing. outside and local s...