The Design of Service System for SMEs Collaborative Alliance: Cluster Supply Chain

Abstract

In order to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) cluster to face the global challenges, the definition of “cluster supply chain” is put forward as a new type of management pattern, which is the combination of industrial cluster and supply chain management. However, the related research on cluster supply chain is still in its infancy, and it is difficult to put theory results into practice. Based on the background, this paper presents an analytic framework to bridge the gap between theory and practice in the field. The framework includes four views - business modeling, specification modeling, realization modeling, system evolution, and integrates methods from value network modeling, agent oriented modeling and service oriented analysis &design. In the end, we utilize a case study of China textile industry for demonstrating how to apply the framework to provide new insights into the construction and development of cluster supply chain

Milk runs model with overtime: application to cluster supply chain

“…The answer to the problem of small and medium enterprises in implementing modern logistics solution can be the implementation of a cluster supply chain idea (CSC). CSC is a new concept of logistics management which was created as a result of combination of two ideas: industry cluster and supply chain management [3,6,13].…”

“…The cluster supply chain is a network composed of horizontal and vertical links between companies [3,6,13]. As a result of horizontal links (with different companies dealing with the same link of supply chain), enterprises can together achieve the operating scale exceeding their individual possibilities e.g.…”

“…As a result of horizontal links (with different companies dealing with the same link of supply chain), enterprises can together achieve the operating scale exceeding their individual possibilities e.g. collective purchase at lower unit price, the achievement of optimal scale of equipment operation, enabling the realization of large orders, and even competing with huge construction companies [3,6,13]. Meanwhile, by the vertical links (with companies dealing with different links in a supply chain) they can reduce level of stocks, improve the timeliness of deliveries and adjust their number to the current needs, or reduce the uncertainty of the made decisions.…”

“…Meanwhile, by the vertical links (with companies dealing with different links in a supply chain) they can reduce level of stocks, improve the timeliness of deliveries and adjust their number to the current needs, or reduce the uncertainty of the made decisions. The combination of industry cluster and supply chain management, operating as a regional, effective and economic cooperation platform, allows small and medium companies to survive, develop and improve their competitiveness [3,6,13].…”

Investigating community structure in perspective of ego network

“…Graphical interpretation of data as information network or relationship network has gained attention in several domains. Application areas include text clustering (Wei, Lu, Chang, Zhou, & Bao, 2015), social network analysis (Fan & Yeung, 2015;Moradi, Olovsson, & Tsigas, 2014;Nikolaev, Razib, & Kucheriya, 2015), image processing (Boykov & Funka-Lea, 2006;Grady, 2006;Li & Wu, 2015), video processing (Yeung, Yeo, & Liu, 1998), biological network (Wang, Li, Chen, & Pan, 2011) and neural network (Liu & juan Ban, 2015), world wide web (Jeevan, Prashanth, Punith, & Hegde, 2011;Mukhopadhyay & Sing, 2004), supply chain network (Li & Daie, 2014;Xue, Wei, & Zeng, 2011) and many others. Growing size and complexity of relationship network in various application domain seek more effective, and accurate analysis to study such complex data system.…”