A Collaboration Design Method for Facilitating SME Inclusion in Global Supply Chains

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) face steep challenges in fulfilling sustainability and resilience requirements when joining global supply chains. These challenges often relate to lack of capabilities, accreditations and/or capacity demanded by OEMs and Tier 1 players in the process of forming a supply chain composition. To address some of the challenges and lower entry barriers for SMEs, this paper formalises a Collaboration Design Method (CDM) that can assemble and coordinate supplier teams responding to a tender from a large buyer. CDM comprises five recursive design decisions: (1) Decomposing tendering goals; (2) Assigning sub-goals to suppliers in a team; (3) Operationalizing sub-goals through supplier processes within a team; (4) Decomposing processes to identify steps that can be outsourced; and (5) Defining coordination mechanisms. Feedback from industrial SMEs indicates that CDM provides a viable approach to tame supply chain formation complexity and ease barriers that prevent SMEs from collaborating in global supply chains.