Modelling the collaborative forecasting decision-making process in decentralised supply chains. Towards a reference model

Decision system technologies have strongly supported modelling and have solved planning complexities in supply chains in a collaborative context. Moreover, the development of supply chains are increasingly oriented to shape relationships among the firms, companies or nodes involved, generally in manufacturing and logistic processes. In addition, these relationships tend to be more cooperative and collaborative, which is a determining factor to create value in supply chains (Mitra and Sanghal, 2008). Furthermore, in the forecasting process context, Holweg et al. (2003) consider the fact that information sharing not only helps to create more visible and predictable demand in the system, but also allows the easier implement and complete customer-specific control processes. In addition, Aviv (2001) considers a supply chain in which each member maintains its own forecasting process, and is also capable of incorporating forecast updates into the replenishment process. Indeed, the collaborative forecasting process applies supply chain management concepts to the forecasting process, and uses the information and technology available to force a shift from independent to dependent forecasted demand, known as demand (Rodriguez et al., 2008). Poler et al. (2008) states that the collaborative forecasting process is based on the fact that each interrelated company has relevant information available to forecast what the rest do not have. This supports the implementation of the collaboration model and the progressive spreading across the non-collaborative firms. Moreover, Stubbings et al. (2008) establishes that in order to arrive at some kind of shared forecasts, the individual collaborator forecast must be driven by some data source in order to conduct a collaborative forecasting process, mainly when such data sources are distinct and influence the current outcomes. Therefore, this paper proposes a collaborative decision-making model that supports collaborative forecasting which considers and supports collaboration from a decentralised viewpoint among the supply chain nodes.