A Suppliers Monitoring System Utilizing Control Chart

Because of the networking technologies progress made, and the collaboration theories developed, the relationship of suppliers and buyers is changed to a collaborative one nowadays. The performance of each member in a supply chain will affect the market competitiveness of the chain. Therefore, how to choose an appropriate collaborative partner becomes an important issue for the initiator of the supply chain. The performance quality of the supplier is the key factor of wining the competition in a market. If the performance quality of the supplier is good and stable, it can supply its downstream with sufficient quality resources and thus build competitive advantages. There are enterprises using information technology to assist the monitoring of the supply chain, from material flow to customer’s relationship. Information technologies, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), are employed to deal with the problem. Business transaction data, such as delivered quality, price, date, quantity, etc., can be saved in a database and then analyzed to form production policies. The aims of the research are to construct a framework of supplier monitoring information system and to propose a control-chart-based mechanism for monitoring the performance of suppliers in a business-to-business (B2B) supply chain environment. The research uses the delivered quality, date, and quantity as the monitoring indexes, and adopts the concept of control chart to construct an information system that monitors business performances of suppliers in a real time manner.