Facing the consumer electronic market, retailers would like to maintain sufficient shelf levels by procuring products from their product suppliers so they can satisfy their consumers with the highest possible service level. On the supply side, the product suppliers (i.e., final assembly manufacturer) have to fulfill the orders on time while they also need to source components from component suppliers to meet production needs. The demand-supply interactions between retailers, product suppliers and component suppliers thus form a multi-tier supply chain. Addressing various issues of supply chain, the CPFR committee of VICS (Voluntary Inter-industry Commerce Standards) Association developed a CPFR (Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment) model which accentuates collaboration activities among chain members. Since its introduction, CPFR has been recognized as one of the leading industrial standards of supply chain. Concerning the collaborative replenishment of CPFR and perceiving from the final assembly manufacturer in the demand-supply scenario, this research focuses on the collaboration operations to develop a decision support framework which addresses the relationships between the focal assembly manufacturer and its retailers and component suppliers. Among others, the key issue is how to select component suppliers in order to meet the production needs and fulfill a given retailer order. The framework consists of three phases of analysis: (1) stakeholder analysis for identifying the requirements and key attributes of the retailer and suppliers, (2) mathematics programming for supplier selection, and (3) simulation of the order fulfillment process. A case study of a cellular phone manufacturer is presented to demonstrate the decision support framework.
