Improving the Plan of a Manufacturing Network with Non-Integrated Business Units

Despite the independency of companies in a supply chain as a network of separated business units which produce altogether the value for final customers, companies are dependent on resources and information of other members of the supply chains. To manage the use of resources and information, supply chain management plays a major role to coordinate independent companies by using the coordination mechanisms. According to the literature of supply chain management, some mechanisms largely use the information shared by members to achieve an optimal solution and some others are based on minimum level of information sharing. Planning based on minimum level of information sharing could increase the complexity of supply chain management and the complexity is ever higher when number of independent members in a supply network augments. This research addresses the problem coordination in a supply chain with more than two partners, while the information in a private element, which is not exchanged with other partners.