Measuring horizontal collaboration intensity in supply chain: a graph-theoretic approach

Supply chain (SC) collaboration is the prerequisite for successful procurement and operational business practices for short life cycle products, especially due to competitive marketplace, globalisation and rapid change of technologies. This study focuses on the semiconductor industry as the case industry to demonstrate the evaluation of horizontal collaboration among the SC partners. It uses a graph-theoretic framework to comprehensively assess the intensity of collaboration with respect to individual horizontal collaboration initiatives. This framework considers the interdependencies and inheritances among the critical collaboration attributes to analyse the complex and unstructured problem of determining compatibility among competing suppliers. A compatibility measure, termed as horizontal collaboration intensity (HCI), is developed to assess the relationships among these evaluation attributes and evaluate the success of the collaboration initiative. An illustrative example using a focus group case study from a semiconductor industry demonstrates the applicability of the proposed framework for the measurement of horizontal collaboration initiative.