A decision support system for the collaborative selection of strategies in enterprise networks

Abstract

Collaborative networks (CN) consist of autonomous and heterogeneous partners, and each defines its own objectives and formulates its own strategies, which are selected and activated to achieve these objectives. The heterogeneity that characterises network partners could lead to contradictions appearing among the strategies formulated in each CN enterprise. Consequently, the strategies formulated in one enterprise could negatively influence the achievement of the objectives defined in other enterprises of the same network. These contradictions lead to strategies misalignments, which worsens the network performance. In order to deal with these misalignments, a DSS is proposed to support the process of selecting the strategies among all those formulated, with the aim of achieving higher alignment levels. The proposed DSS considers the impacts that each strategy formulated in each enterprise has on the performance of the objectives defined by each network partner. This allows enterprises to select a set of aligned strategies. The selection of proper strategies to be activated in each enterprise strongly influences the CN's performance level, and higher levels of network adaptability, agility and competitiveness are achieved. The proposed DSS is validated under real conditions in a food industry network. The DSS is evaluated by emulating real collaborative conditions and is compared with the equivalent non-collaborative decision making perspective used for selecting strategies. The results demonstrate that the collaborative approach outperforms the performance level of the non-collaborative one and is more effective for handling the robustness and the long-term operation of the CN.