The scientific journal of the design and development of industrial products

Advanced methodology for structuring partners selection criteria

Last Updated on Wednesday, 09 February 2011 17:55

Authors: A. Wehbe^1,2, M. Zolghadri², C. Baron¹, G. Auriol¹

Institutions: ¹INSA de Toulouse, Université de Toulouse (France), ²Université de Bordeaux (France)

Abstract: The company's ability in developing new products is a crucial factor in its commercial success which mostly relies on partner’s performance too. These partners by their needed and asked contribution become an integrated part of the industrial strategy. The partner selection task is therefore a more and more risky one because companies have to take account of diversified and complex selection criteria. Consequently, the selection criteria should be structured in order to be feasible for an efficient partner selection. In this paper, we present a methodology for selecting partners, and we use the partners’ classification as the main driver of criteria structure. This idea is illustrated through its application to a set of selection criteria taken from the scientific literature.

Keywords: Product design, partner’s selection, new product development project, partner network, structuring criteria