A strategic alliance formation framework for adaptive supply chains

Adaptive supply chain is the newest form of supply chains. Its main aim is to sense and respond correctly to dynamic changes in today's fierce competitive environment. Adaptive supply chain has been accepted gradually by more and more corporations. Successful strategic alliance plays an important rule in adaptive supply chains, but too many strategic alliances fail to meet their partners' objectives. While the reasons behind alliance failures are complex, and vary according to type of alliance and industry, many failures result from ill-conceived overall alliance strategies, narrowly focused industry and firm partner selection analytical thinking and models, and poor alliance management, execution and implementation. In particular, the well-informed and strategically driven selection of alliance partners is a core element in building successful alliances. This paper proposed a basic framework for strategic partner selection, a very complicated multi-criteria decision process. Entropy method was used to give a relative justice weight for different objectives. Finally an illustrative example is given to show the usage of the proposed method.