click on star to go back to Joseph Sarkis' HomepageStrategic interorganizational alliances aid organizations in gaining competitive advantages and improving production efficiencies. Network organizations, virtual corporations, and value-adding partnerships are envisioned by many experts as the epitome of interorganizational alliances for the 21st century. These multiorganizational structures are viewed as a solution for rapid introduction of products while maintaining high quality and minimal costs. One common key issue in designing these new forms of organizations is the partner selection process. The business processes ("owned" by organizational partners) must both individually and as group, be efficient. This paper proposes a two phase quantitative framework to aid the decision making process in partner selection to most effectively select partners that may fit within a globally efficient enterprise. Phase 1 identifies efficient candidates for each type of business process (e.g. inbound logistics, design, manufacturing, outbound logistics, etc.) utilizing data envelopment analysis. Phase 2 involves the execution of a goal programming model to determine the best portfolio of partners based on a number of objectives. Model application and insights are evident through application of an illustrative example.
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