supply network leadership: a macro – approach view of cooperative buyer – supplier – engineer partnerships iran

undoubtedly, more attention is being made in the word service and industries that can be learnt from manufacturing for improving its production out puts and their associated quality and cost. these include such lean production, jit, tqm, and the relationship between buyer, supplier and finally the customer satisfaction. the main purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between three main components of production management in today’s industries namely supplier, buyer and engineer partnership in iran industries. an attempt also has been made to create closer collaboration in car manufacturing – and contemporary trends in production theory such as lean production, agile manufacturing and high performance production system. the model of supply network leadership (snl) has been developed in this paper for assessing the interrelationships between the supply chains with respect to the national objectives based on the national motivation of iranian economics and industries. the snl has a marco view on the interrelationships between the above mentioned objectives such as, imports substitution, export promotion, entrepreneurial activities, technology acquisition, quality of life improvement, etc. the leadership capabilities for any hierarchy determine the degree of size, complexity, executive penetration and power of network. the snl acts like a cell, any resource absorption from the environment is the special task of buyer, and all internal supporting and human resource effectively and any associated processing is the special task of supplier and finally any duties related to growths, evolution and generation can be viewed as the special task of engineer. we have argued that the snl may hold lessons for the iranian automobile manufacturing. the emphasis on flexibility and more customization may be especially appropriate.