Hi, you can have full undesrstanding of the supply chain design from the book written by Chopra & Meindl, Supply Chain Management. specially Section 1.

FYI :)

Mr. Alkhatib, 

Hope that my answer will help you. Seems that the discussion is about SC agile/lean or responsive/efficient. Read the paper: Fisher, Marshall L. "What is the right supply chain for your product?." Harvard business review 75 (1997): 105-117.

Regards,

Priscilla

Thank you all, nice comments and great contributions.

what I'm looking fro is real examples, and experts opinions.

in your SC(s), based  on your experience:

Who are the SC Founders? the Suppliers of suppliers, Manufacturer, Wholesalers, Retailers, Customers.... In your current SC(s) who are the Founders?

What are the SC Strategic Objectives? do you've something in your mind? In your current SC(s) what are the SC strategic objectives?

What are best methods and techniques that could be used to design SC(s) and select the SC members in way fit and match with the SC strategic objectives?

Thank you :)

Here, in Brazil, the companies choose the focus company, which will be in the middle of the SC, after this, by some KPIs define the right suppliers, and according to their products (goods or services); mkt strategies who will be their customers.

I suggest to you a survey by a software sending to the specialists.

In Thailand, usually "who is the focal company" is depended on the industry. For example in the fruit supply chain, the focal company are those collector firm. 

Dear Saleh, I try to answer your questions as follows.

Who are the SC Founders?

Every company can be in every moment a "SC founder" for itself, by deciding how to shape its purchasing, manufacturing and distribution networks.

First it has to choose which activities on which parts it wants to do on its own (insource) and which it prefers to outsource to suppliers.

Then, it should identify wether it wants to purchase cheap parts from low cost (and maybe off-shore) countries, or to resort to up-market suppliers based (say) in Germany. Next, for each part it should define how many suppliers it wants to have, and which ones. By giving an answer to all of these questions a purchasing netwotk is shaped / re-shaped.

With regard to internal manufacturing, when the insourced operations are decided, it should be made clear which kind of production network makes sense. For instance:

- centralized production capacity, close to design center or headquarter vs. decentralized to position capacity close to customers, or competencies

- generalistic or focused factories: factories can be focused by market, product, process, ...

- for each factory type, one only or several factories in parallel

Once these questions have been answered, the manufacturing network footprint has been decided.

Finally, the company can decide wether it prefers to strategically focus on a small number of partnering customers, or to be open to any potential customer it attracts, and by which distribution network it can better serve its cutomers. This encompass deciding the number of distribution levels end the degree of parallelism of warehouses at each level.

What are the SC Strategic Objectives?

I define a SC as a meta-organism, composed of companies, resources (e.g. facilties, warehouses, people, etc.) and processes (e.g. planning, manufacturing, purchasing, etc.) potentially spaning from raw materials down to final customer, that pursue, to a certain extent, common objectives of providing the final customer with the right product / service, at the right moment, in the right place and with the right price.

Many exempla show that the SC optimum is NOT reached by combining the local optima, since a SC is far from having a linear behaviour.

So, where the single companies within a certain SC start having diverging objectives is when each tries to maximize it's slice of the common profit cake generated by the supply chain.

What are best methods and techniques that could be used to design SC(s) and select the SC members in way fit and match with the SC strategic objectives?

This is your hardest question indeed. I don't know quite obviously a olistic technique. There are several techniques and tools that help managers in their choices and that act seperately in the different domains. For instance the Kraljich matrix can hel shape your supply network, and so on.

Also take a look at these articles and books:

The most cited articles and best described,

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1366554505000487

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925527398000796

http://www.eng.uwi.tt/depts/mech/ugrad/courses/meng3006/Week09b.pdf

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037722179780080X

Chapter 13 of the book named: Supply Chain Management by Chopra & Meindl discusses the design of the transportation along the layers of the supply chain which can be contributed to the real case design of the supply chain.

Hi Saleh,

nice questions and tough ones!

I guess you are more interested in real world approach ...

Here my thoughts/opinion based on my personal experience from positions in Procurement, Logistics and Supplier Management in +360K and +50K employees companies:

It seems to me that companies do not decide to become the SC Designer. They may become a focal company by the mere fact that it is a gatekeeper and/or "node" in relation to the market/customers.

I doubt that even nowadays companies have a function/department that looks at the supplier base in its entirety and tries to "design" the supply chain. The interaction with suppliers are managed on a lower level and individually. Selection: The degree to which other aspects than price, on-time delivery, product quality are considered is still low (namely Total Cost of Ownership, dependencies/relations within the supplier base or between competitors, compatibility of company cultures,  compatibility of processes, level of trust, collaborative approach, approach to quality, etc, etc, etc). A holistic selection approach driven by a long term strategic approach and considering the latter could help.

Strategies are developed in direction of the market/customers, not so much in direction of the suppliers it seems ...

Just thoughts ...

Best regards

Rodrigo Oliva-Cordoba

Supply chain design is driven by the need - to provide support for the essential elements of the various activities it delivers:

Supply Chain Strategy fits the Operations Management Philosophy:

• Using Operations: Operations as a Competitive Weapon Operations Strategy & Project Management

• Managing process: Process Strategy, Process Analysis, Process Performance and Quality, Constraint Management, Process Layout & Lean Systems

• Managing Chains: Supply Chain Strategy, Location, Inventory Management, Forecasting, Sales and Operations Planning, Resource Planning & Scheduling

Thank you Panday, Thank you everyone, I try to expand my research model from LSPs evaluation and selection to SC design, member selection, and flexible SC design, that's why I asked about real example about your SCs to see how real SCs are designed and managed, Books and theories say something and what I notice in realty is another thing, hope to hear more about your own experiences in SC design,

Regards,

and Thank you All

Dear Saleh, since Marco Perona already answered completely the first two questions I'll try to answer the third one.

What are best methods and techniques that could be used to design SC(s) and select the SC members in way fit and match with the SC strategic objectives?

If we consider the SC as a possible physical instance of a Value Chain and SC strategic objectives have already been defined (such as responsiveness or flexibility), then the designing activity can be thought as the process to identify:

Just to mention some crucial aspects. Depending on the designing target with respect to defined objectives you could decide to identify an "optimised" or "robust" configuration of these SC factors, that's not the same, since you'll have to adopt different methods and techniques.

In the first case you could use Mixed Linear Integer Programming (MILP) approach by considering a deterministic knowledge of your factors or variables, while in the second case you could use Discrete Event Simulation (DES) approach by considering even a stochastic knowledge of your factors or variables.

But if the level of knowledge of your factors or variables is still immature or just at aggregate level you could use a System Dynamics (SD) approach to study main SC dynamics resulting from different configurations.

Some good examples can be find on the web site of AnyLogic sw a multi-paradigm software. On the web site documentation you can also find very interesting examples of SC design and optimisation, some of them including Agent Based Modelling (ABM), in order to catch emergent behaviours from, for instance, a customer base distributed along a space.

Hoping this can help you.

Flavio

Thank you all for your contributions, special thanks for Marco Perona and Flavio Toneli for their detailed responses.

Regarding the first two questions,

I think, tell now we didn't have a clear definition of SC founders, and SC strategic objectives, and therefore, it's not an easy mission to identify them in real world.

if you ask any firm about their SCs founders or SC strategic objectives, whether they didn't know or they view themselves as the SC founders and their own strategic objectives as the SC strategic objectives, which mean there is no clear consonance among the SC members about their strategic objectives.

most SCs have been created 'as needed'. one firm in a specific time under specific conditions based on specific needs start working with other firm which intern works with another one and so on... that's why it's difficult to implement concepts such as SCM, effectiveness, efficiency, and flexibility (agility).

Therefore, SC design and design techniques and methods are crucial research areas, As Flavio said, MILP, DES, and SC are good alternatives to consider, whether in the first early or advanced design stages. but these techniques require huge and up-to-date data about the potential and current SC members, market, economy and customers...and in many cases these data are not exist and/or not accurate, in this case DMs have to deal with the data uncertainty problems, whether through Fuzzy logic, scenario analysis and/or integrating a number of those techniques together...

Current SC modeling and optimizing software are static, based on a large number of assumptions..... any way

I think some ways to conceptualize these concepts, identifying founders, strategic objectives and/or design methods are:

• identifying the SCM best practices, 
• identifying current success SCs features and characteristics, 
• hearing the real story how their SC have been designed and how they manage it now>>>> 

that's why I try to collect SC members' responses and feedback......

thank you all, and best Wishes

Saleh