Building multilateral collaboration in enterprise network

In today's highly competitive business environment companies are constantly seeking for better ways to adapt to the continuous change of the marketplace. Manufacturing has to be organized to be both efficient and flexible in order to meet the customers' requirements for high quality and short delivery time. To achieve these requirements companies have adopted subcontracting strategies and concentrated on their key competencies. In order to regain control over the supply chain, there has been an urgent need in companies to establish tighter relationships with their suppliers. Companies have been creating closer relationships with their suppliers by, e.g., adopting JIT delivery systems, quality certificates and long-term partnerships. However, these relationships have been based on bilateral development between client and supplier and they do not have network perspective, i.e., they have not considered that the client company and all its suppliers have common goals. To make the network more competitive, this demands developing these relationships towards business networks where all significant network companies share their strengths and knowledge by multilateral co-operation. This is a big step for the business culture of today. This step is studied in the case, network-manufacturing kitchen furniture.