Secure collaboration in global design and supply chain environment: Problem analysis and literature review

摘要

Increasing global competition has led to massive outsourcing of manufacturing businesses. Such outsourcing practices require effective collaborations between focal manufacturers and their suppliers by sharing a large amount of information. In the meantime, since some of the suppliers are also potential competitors, protection of confidential information, particularly intellectual properties, during the collaboration is becoming an important issue. Therefore, secure collaboration is of critical significance in the global design and supply chain management. This paper aims to collect and analyze systematically the existing scattered research of secure collaboration in global design and supply chain environment, and to give a comprehensive literature review to summarize the problems and the corresponding solutions. By applying the Environment-based Design (EBD) methodology, the existing methods and technologies are classified into four levels: infrastructure, information, agreement, and confidence. Four corresponding research problems are then formulated: information access control, information partitioning, legal information sharing, and partner trust management. As such, research papers scattered in different areas are integrated into this multi-disciplinary field. Future trends and challenges are also discussed in this paper.