Modeling barriers in supply chain coordination

Supply chain coordination has become a critical success factor for supply chain management (SCM) and for improving the performance of trading partners in a supply chain. Coordination refers to the integration of trading partners in supply chain to accomplish a collective set of tasks and to achieve mutual benefits. There are variables which affect supply chain coordination and those which lead to either local optimization in different stages of the supply chain, or an increase in information delay, distortion, and variability within the supply chain are termed coordination barriers. These barriers influence each other and also adversely affect coordination in the supply chain. The main objective of this paper is to understand the mutual interaction of these barriers and identify the 'driving barriers' (i.e. those which influence the other barriers) and the 'dependent barriers' (i.e. those which are influenced by others). In the present work, these barriers have been identified through a literature survey and expert opinion, with the ranking done using a questionnaire and an interpretive structural modeling (ISM). From this information, an integrated model for supply Chain Coordination barriers was developed which may be useful to Supply chain managers to identify and classify important criteria and to reveal the direct and indirect effects of each criterion on the coordination process in supply chain management.