Supplier relationship managers often find it difficult to evaluate and optimize supplier relationships, which are crucial to the success of their business yet complex and multifaceted, characterized by long-term orientation, uncertainty, temporal evolution, idiosyncratic investment, improvement potential, and adaptation flexibility. How to design optimal supply contracts to govern supplier relationships has been a common problem in business practice for many years. This book draws on the modern theories of investment under uncertainty in the finance literature and proposes a hierarchical, dynamic and value-based solution for supplier relationship and supply contract management. At the strategic level, the author addresses supplier relationship management by putting forward a three-layer relationship valuation procedure and a fuzzy-stochastic relationship valuation model. In addition, decision models for managing a supplier relationship life cycle as well as configuring and planning supplier relationship portfolios are presented. At the tactical level, the author deals with supply contract management. A general, compound supply contract model is proposed and how to design optimal supply contracts under demand risk and price risk is explored. Furthermore, the contract portfolio configuration problem is discussed.
