The globalization of international business, the paucity of international transportation routes to Brazil and the country's customs bureaucracy exert increasing pressure on manufacturers operating in Brazil to find alternatives to reduce the response time to customers without affecting costs. This article therefore presents a decision model for managing the consignation of imported materials in supply chains, whose development was based on several research methods, including the exploratory, the documental and case studies. A key factor in the proposed model is the definition of its set of decision variables. As the first step in the construction of this model, the initial set of proposed variables was tested and reviewed based on the experience of several importing companies that use special customs regimes. The model was subsequently tested at two companies located in Campinas, SP, Brazil, whose data indicate that the use of the model is feasible in certain chains and for goods with certain characteristics, taking advantage of Brazil's customs legislation as an opportunity to gain competitiveness within the context of global supply chain management.
supply chain management; consignation; imported material
