A prominent and contemporary challenge for supply chain (SC) managers concerns the coordination of the efforts of the nodes of the SC in order to mitigate unpredictable market behaviour and satisfy variable customer demand. A productive response to this challenge is to share pertinent market-related information, on a timely basis, in order to effectively manage the decision-making associated with the SC production and transportation planning processes. This paper analyses the most well-known reference modelling languages and frameworks in the collaborative SC field and proposes a novel reference architecture, based upon the Zachman Framework (ZF), for supporting collaborative plan- ning (CP) in multi-level, SC networks. The architecture is applied to an automotive supply chain configuration, where, under a collaborative and decentralised approach, improvements in the service levels for each node were observed. The architecture was shown to provide the base discipline for the organisation of the processes required to manage the CP activity.

The authors thanks the support from the project 'Operations Design and Management in Global Supply Chains (GLOBOP)' (Ref. DPI2012-38061-C02-01), funded by the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, for the supply chain environment research contribution.