An integrated decision support framework for global supply chain co-ordination in automotive industry

Supply chain managers increasingly face co-ordination decisions of how to manage the dependencies between different business activities and between geographical locations under globalisation over last several decades. The alignment of management decisions with a global firm’s business environment and its economic performance has been identified as crucial to the firm’s success, but remains a challenge to management decision makers. This paper proposes an integrated decision support framework that can facilitate supply chain managers to make more efficient and effective global co-ordination decisions. An integrated decision support system (IDSS) is substantiated within the framework. The IDSS integrates information, processes and functions from four key components: global business context, supply chain configuration, cost management, and supply chain co-ordination. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is employed for the decision analysis. The evaluation of the decision framework has been undertaken through a case study within automotive global manufacturing, which demonstrates its applicability to providing solutions to realistic global supply chain co-ordination problems. A key feature of the decision framework is the integrative alignment of decisions with business environment (through capture of decision context) and economic performance (through analysis of decision criteria – cost management) using a formal decision making process.