# Collaborative Planning in Non-Hierarchical Networks--An Intelligent Negotiation-Based Framework
## 2 Collaborative Planning--Technical Background
### Collaborative Planning
This level of integration and coordination is only possible through the implementation of a collaborative approach among different stakeholders along the supply chain, being jointly responsible for network activities such as planning, flow management and manufacturing, and performance management. Collaborative relationships radically transform how information is shared among different partners and drives business processes to new challenges [25]. Research has shown that collaborative planning encompasses activities through which individuals coordinate their respective planning processes. Traditionally, individual companies primarily plan accordingly to their own goals; however, in cooperative relationships, they also try to take into consideration different scenarios to enable the optimization of other players' planning goals. Thus, collaborative planning processes usually consider views which enable individual managers to recognize that their own individual plans should be adjusted, not by their own selfish local criteria, but by optimized global planning goals. In essence, collaborative planning empowers individual companies to align their plans toward a shared objective, facilitating the joint optimization of planning activities across enterprise boundaries [26; 27]. The journey toward adopting a collaborative planning approach has unveiled numerous challenges for individual organizations. Among these challenges, the concept of centralized planning emerges as the most significant. Typically, local production managers tend to project their own realities and argue in favor of implementing a centralized planning approach to ensure the overall success of the network planning function. The seminal work from [PERSON], [PERSON] et al. [28] raised pertinent questions regarding the suitability of a centralized planning approach, highlighting several major obstacles. The authors outlined the following challenges:  
* Collaborative network partners' engagement in several supply chains: companies participate in several networks, which could generate interferences on their planning activities. To successfully manage these multi-supply-chain scenarios, a centralized approach requires to include in its planning scope all the networks involved. * Balance between local and global plan objectives: each individual company manages their internal production plans to achieve the best performance. If these objectives are to be met, all the needed changes to obtain the global plan objectives must be negotiated and not imposed. This is especially true when the network is composed of independent companies. * Reluctance to share information: to implement a centralized decision making, important and strategic information is needed from partners, concerning their resources and capabilities. This information is usually classified as confidential, and companies are unavailable to share it along their partners. * Lack of acceptance of central authority models: the enforcement of central plans requires the capitulation of local autonomy, which is not welcome on the current business market. Considering these major obstacles, the conclusion is that a centralized approach might not be the best approach to guarantee a global coordination among independent companies in complex supply chains. Alternatively, a decentralized approach without coordination mechanisms among partners might lead to nonoptimal solutions, because it will only reflect local solutions. A dependable decentralized coordination mechanism based on negotiation might be the solution, because it aims to ensure information confidentiality, decision autonomy, and trust enrichment among supply chain partners. When dealing with dynamic and intricate business scenarios, such as those found in the textile and footwear sectors, the centralized approach imposes various constraints. One notable constraint is the loss of local autonomy, which is typically rejected by most companies due to their segmentation, competitive nature, and rivalry.