Supplier consortium

It is possible that a company may not possess capabilities to satisfy the set of aU needs of its customers. If so, it can form alliances with other companies with complementary skills, and capture customer s order. Nagarajan and Sosic (2009) provide multiple examples of supplier coalitions from different industries. They cite Stallkamp (2001) who discusses consortium formation between Delphi (auto part manufacturer), Lear (interior trim manufacturer), and the suppliers of wiring, carpets, and molded plastic, to satisfy the total cockpit needs of one of the Big Three auto manufacturers. Similarly, the alliance between Symbol Technologies (scanner manufacturer) and Paxar/Monarch, a leader in bar code labeling enabled them to supply a bundle that included a bar code labeler and scanner and thus win valuable customer orders. 

The Ontario Motor Coach Association represents several alliances between bus operators, hoteliers, and retail outlets in Canada, and it sells service packages to tour operators, who in turn sell tour packages to customers (Nagarajan and Sosic 2009). 

Consolidators or system integrators play an important role in facilitating supplier alliance. They add value in the supply chain in multiple ways reduce the number of transactions, win customer orders, decrease the cost of distribution, and increase search efficiency. 

Consider 10 manufacturers each supplying one item to 100 retailers. If each manufacturer sells directly to the retailers, there would be 1,000 transactions. 

The use of consolidators also aids the search processes of both buyers and sellers. Customers must search for certain products and services, while producers search to determine their customers needs. The degree of uncertainty in both search processes can be reduced by using consolidators. For example, consumers are more likely to find what they are looking for when they shop at retail institutions, organized by the lines of trade such as grocery, hardware, and clothing stores. 

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The battery supply company would assembly the battery heat source reactor at his factory then he must transport it to the customer s site, install it next to a pre-built, non-safety grade balance of plant and bring it to power over a short start-up period. The supplier consortium, therefore, needs to include a large-scale construction and logistic company. Such companies exist in the ocean oil rig business to build ocean oil rigs in shipyard-like facilities, tow them by sea to the installation site, and using cranes of many hundred ton capacity, install and start up the complex rigs in a matter of months (see Fig. XXIV-15). 

In a volatile market, contracts must reflect the uncertainties in the marketplace. This can be included in a contract in multiple ways. For example, the buyer can incorporate a delivery window instead of a fixed delivery time permit a small variation in the quantity delivered permit the wholesale price to vary within some botmds and buy insurance or financial hedges to insulate against market volatility. Examples of creative risk sharing contracts would be, capacity reservation, build-operate-transfer, forming supplier consortium, and forecast revision. 

A number of material suppliers offer information on their products on electronic devices (floppy discs, CDs, etc.) for use on personal computers. An important one, called Campus, is a database concept started by four German material manufacturers who use a uniform software. This database, initially developed jointly by BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, and Hulls, provided for other manufacturers to join. The present consortium has more than 50 materials suppliers worldwide. It is given in the form of diskettes in German, English, French, Italian, or Spanish. Each diskette contains the uniform test and evaluation program and the range of the respective material producers. It runs on IBM-compatible personal computers under the MS-DOS operating system. 

MCBase offers the possibility to load the original CAMPUS data of different suppliers from version 3.0 and higher into one database, which allows direct comparison. It has been developed in close cooperation with the CAMPUS consortium. For more information see http //www.m-base.de/. MCBase is user friendly and offers extremely efficient handling of material data. All CAMPUS options are available define search profiles define and sort tables print tables and data sheets curve overlay scatter plots. In addition MCBase 4.1 offers search in curves search for comparable grades text search update via Internet calculation of simulation parameters. A French version of MCBase is available from the distribution agent in France. 

Second, partnerships between materials developers and end users must be facilitated and encouraged. In some cases, this step may mean an R D consortium between university researchers, a chemical or materials company, and a product manufacturer. The National Institute of Standards and Technology s Advanced Technology Program (NIST ATP) is a good model that should be expanded. Several projects that have been funded are examples of this integration of research-development-commercialization by universities, a materials supplier, and an end-user product manufacturer. 

Figure 4.58 Supplier-specific assembly of the pChemTec consortium [24] (by courtesy of microchemtec).

The final success I wanted to share with you is one of the home runs from the status report mentioned above. It was done by a group of small- and medium-sized supplier chain manufacturers called the Auto Body Consortium. The Auto Body Consortium also partnered with two universities. University of Michigan and Wayne State University, and two of the big three auto manufacturers. General Motors and Chrysler. As it turns out, the brains of the project was a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Michigan. He had the original inspiration, grabbed some partners, and said, I ve got this neat idea. What followed stemmed from this neat idea. ... 

CAN is the serial communication network used in most intelligent SAS products. Future systems such as SbW will need fault-tolerant networks (FTU), which provide the necessary safety level for those systems, that is, being predictable and deterministic. There are two major protocols in development, TTP (time triggered protocol [32]) and Flexray, supported by two different consortia of car manufacturers and system suppliers. VW/Audi, PSA, Renault, Delphi, Visteon, United Technologies, Airbus, Honeywell, AMS C C Electronics, and NEC are in the TTP consortium. DC, BMW, CM, Bosch, Philips, digital dna, Motorola, and partners are the Flexray group [30, 31]. 

One of the recent initiatives is the CAPE-OPEN consortium. This involves the collaboration of some major operating companies, software suppliers, and universities, with the support of the European Union (Braunschweig et al., 2000). The ultimate vision is to transform process modelling in a cooperative activity consisting of sharing a large number of components from a variety of sources. Moreover, the simulation might be conceived as an interactive process executed on different computers via Internet or Intranet facilities. 

A consortium of producer and suppliers to share costs and risks The best way to achieve this condition is to associate historic suppliers or monopolist distributors to the project with a consortium structure. This is possible in Texas in which there are monopoly islands comprising large municipalities (Austin, CPS Energy of San Antonio, and so on) which cover 20 percent of the retail markets (Adib and Zarnikau, 2006). ... 

Market risks securing the investment by long-term contracts The consortium is likely to benefit from favorable financial terms because of the presence of municipal utilities which will be a proof of predictability of the customer base and stability (TIACT, 2005). They could transfer risks to local consumers via their tariff s. Moreover 75 percent of the NRG s energy share (44 percent) will be sold by long-term contracts with historic suppliers in Texas. Only the production of the remaining 400 MW will be sold in the market in order to seize opportunities to retain benefits from future carbon policies in the medium term. ... 

A consortium of consumers and suppliers The promoter, TVO, is an electricity generation cooperative of pulp and paper companies and some electricity supply companies. Indeed the cooperative is 60 percent controlled by PVO, which is itself a cooperative owned by different forestry companies (42 percent UPM, 16 percent Stora, 42 percent other), and already owns and operates two nuclear reactors and a thermal plant. The other shareholders are the main Finnish production and supply company Fortum (25 percent), a distribution company EPVO (6.6 percent), and Helsinki city (8.1 percent). 

Federal Acquisition Jump Station Links to federal government acquisitions on the Internet, http / / nais.nasa.gov/fedproc/home.html Film and Bag Federation The Film and Bag Federation, formerly the Plastic Bag Association, is a consortium of 60 of the industry s leading manufacturers and suppliers, who work together on issues of interest and concern to the industry, http //www.plasticbag. com... 

Bennett D, King F (2009) Automotive supplier integration from automotive supplier community to modular consortium. In Proceedings of the 14th annual logistics research network conference, Cardiff, 9-11 Sept 2009... 

A related phenomenon in the area of procurement and supplier relationships has been industry wide consortia where multiple buyers and suppliers within an industry join and conduct business. Better transactional efficiency has been highlighted as the key benefit of these consortia such as Covisint (automotive) and Converge (hi-tech). The dynamics of these entities are not very well understood and pose several important questions. For example, one could expect that having multiple suppliers on the same platform is likely to reduce prices for the buyer, but it is likely to benefit other buyers in the consortium as well. Thus, it is not clear if one should join the consortium in the first place. In fact, one of the reasons for Dell deciding not to join either of the high tech consortia, Converge or e2open, could be that they do not want to open up their supply chain processes to competitors. 

A consortium of four companies was involved in the development of the steel and plastic (SP) cab Scott Bader of Wollaston, suppliers of the SMC moulding material J, J. Harvey of Manchester, tool designers and makers Bifort Engineering of Blackpool, moulders of the SMC panels. 

The power structure directly influences the definition of configuration objectives. For instance, a dominating unit can focus almost exclusively on its own objectives, while a consortium of equal partners needs to consider the objectives of all partners in the multi-objective framework. A choice of relevant parameters and costs is particularly influenced by a broker. For instance, from the point of view of a manufacturer, he/she is only concerned about the cost of raw materials, but not about the other internal costs of a potential supplier. Questions about accounting for transportation costs also need to be resolved—either these are included in the purchasing cost, paid by the supplier, or paid by the manufacturer. 

NEMI, The National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (NEMI) is an industry-led consortium whose mission is to assure leadership of the global electronics manufacturing supply chain. Its membership includes more than 60 electronics manufacturers, suppliers, associations, government agencies, and... 

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