Today’s supply chains are often characterized by a heterarchical supply chain structure – meaning that a high division of labor is being spread over legally independent actors. In case of a spare parts supply chain, the potential actors are e.g. spare parts producers, logistics service providers, inventory managers and maintenance service providers. These autonomous yet in their actions highly interdependent companies need to be coordinated in order to avoid inefficiencies and to meet customer needs adequately. Due to the heterarchical structure, specific requirements and constraints upon the possibilities of collaboration are imposed, for instance a limited willingness of companies to share potentially sensitive information, e.g. regarding cost parameters, the abandonment of local decision autonomy and the incentives that are required to participate in collaborations in order to achieve mutual. This aspects and peculiarities of heterarchical supply chains are addressed by current supply chain management (SCM) research in the field of collaborative planning (CP). CP is regarded as a promising solution to coordinate heterarchical supply chains since they explicitly take into account their specific characteristics.

This bachelor thesis aims at analyzing a coordination problem of the spare parts supply chain of a Brazilian manufacturer producing automation solutions for the oil industry by applying the assessment approach of the Framework for Intelligent Supply Chain Collaboration (FRISCO). The so called FRISCO framework has been developed at the Chair for Information Systems and SCM in order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of assessing and modeling CP concepts. Following the FRISCO assessment approach, the spare parts supply chain is to be characterized by applying the classification structure provided by FRISCO that contains attributes specifying the structure (e.g. spare parts supply chain tiers), actor relationship (e.g. coordination constraints) and decision situation (e.g. coordination goal) of the spare parts supply chain coordination problem. Besides the support for analyzing coordination problems, it further enables the design of appropriate CP concepts by supporting the identification of reusable (parts of) existing CP concepts from previous research. Therefore, the FRISCO assessment approach should be applied for designing a draft of a coordination concept for the given spare parts supply chain. This draft should consider the underlying spare parts supply chain actors and their interdependencies in-between as characterized by means of the FRISCO classification structure and will further make use of the classified CP concepts provided by FRISCO that could be reused for designing the draft. The thesis will continuously apply FRISCO in order to efficiently assess the coordination problem and model the corresponding coordination concept.

Literature:

• Hellingrath B, Küppers P (2011) Multi-Agent Based Evaluation of Collaborative Planning Concepts in Heterarchical Supply Chains. In: Sucky E, Asdecker B, Dobhan A, Haas S, Wiese J (eds) Logistikmanagement: Herausforderungen, Chancen & Lösungen, Band III. (pp. 1–22). Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press
• Hellingrath, B., Böhle, C., Küppers, P., & Könning, M. (2012). Dezentrales Koordinationskonzept zur multilateralen kollaborativen Produktions- und Distributionsplanung. In: Proceedings of the Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik 2012, Braunschweig, 187–197.