Dynamic, customer-oriented improvement of supply networks

The paper considers the dynamic coordination of a supply network consisting of one supplier company and multiple customer companies. The ongoing business relationships are based on general contracts. But also the informal understandings and agreements that are facilitated by ongoing business relationships are taken into account: the supplier tries to reduce the prevailing information asymmetry by performing regular customer satisfaction surveys. This information together with the contract attributes is used by the supplier to improve the performance of its business processes and/or the contract attributes that contribute the most to improving total customer satisfaction. We propose a four-stage decision-making procedure which is mainly based on statistical analyses (dependency analysis, logit model) and a managerial procedure describing whether the supplier should renegotiate the contract with a specific customer to improve the performance of the overall network. The statistical analysis is illustrated by a real-world case study of a medium-sized German company and its customers.