Analysis of the practices in the shipbuilding industry: contributions to building supply networks

Abstract

The structuring of supply networks, observed in the context of cooperation among companies, has been studied as a means to understand how the participating companies in a supply network can be integrated within a new business environment, endowed with a complex system and rapidly changing with more competitive positioning chances. The objective of this research is to analyze the behavior of the attributes considered to be important in building collaborative relationships in networks, assuming that this relationship promotes the internal competitiveness of the companies and their network. The study is performed by analyzing the practices of the existing relationships in the shipbuilding industry (ICN) in Brazil, considering the collaborative principles proposed in the theory and the analyzed industry context. The analyses are based on the responses of 196 reporting companies of a survey applied to 1,160 companies identified, located all over the country. Through a Factor Analysis, 15 variables were selected to explain the collaborative relationships in that network. Those variables were simplified to five main components, grouped according to mechanisms or practices of quality, innovation, trust, closeness and productivity. Although the principal components explain the latent structure of the behavior of these firms, the relative percentage frequency suggests that the existence of these attributes in the analyzed chain is still incipient.

Keywords:
Supply network; Shipbuilding industry (ICN); Ship componentes; Collaborative relationship