1. Introduction
In today’s market, is ever increasing the requirement for a Supply Chain Management (SCM) approach as a key strategic factor to increase both efficiency and effectiveness aiming at realize the organizational goals, allowing leading to greater synergy (Harland et al., 1999) [36], transparency, openness, sharing and trust. The implementation of such an approach, however, requires considerable commitment and resources, and needs the consumption of a huge amount of resources, time at the first place. Further difficulties include a lack of common purpose, multiple and often hidden goals, power imbalances, different cultures and procedures, incompatible collaborative capability and continuing lack of openness and opportunistic behavior (Huxham, 1996) [37]. The research if focused on the mega-yacht building division, which received so far little attention by researchers and is described in Section 2. To apply the principles of the SCM, it was firstly necessary to analyze the supply chain of the market, which combine the complexity and the fragmentation of the construction sector to the high personalization and customer orientation of the luxury sector as highlighted in Section 3.
In Section 4 there is a classification of the mega-yacht division so to obtain the most suitable strategies, which are suggested by literature. These are fundamental to establish the long-period planning and to verify the effective correspondence with companies’ real strategies.
After having mapped the supply chain and have analyzed each link, considering the amount of informations exchanged, the research develops an innovative methodology to define supply chain performance systems. In the mega-yacht division, as commonly happens in many other sectors, metrics do not fully capture the overall supply chain performance, being primarily company-specifically focused, and they can not identify threat and opportunities of the environment, losing customer value and competitiveness. In Section 5 it is presented the approach that measure the performance of critical supply chain processes, in order to encourage a cooperative behavior across firms and to direct management attention and effort to the areas characterised by higher levels of performance for the supply chain [38].
Another principal aspect to implement an SCM approach is to consider also the risks, which affect the mega-yacht division, and in Section 6 is described the link between
performance and risks. En fact introducing SCM is not a process void of risks, which need to be deal adequately, and the research has the objective of defining the risk affecting the mega-yacht supply chain and their level of significance. Section 6 is entirely dedicated to the Risk Management approach. The definition of the risk factors is presented with a new methodology, which allows identifying precisely the origin and the responsibility of each factor. The Risk Assessment phase is based on the definition of the level of significance of each factor, as appears in literature. The whole research avails itself of the contribution of direct interviews to the participants of the supply chain.
In Section 7 are introduced the results of the output of the questionnaire, which scope was both to probe the truthfulness of the analysis carried out as to investigate new findings, which were not stand out from literature.
Conclusions of the research are in Section 8, in order to point out the performed research contributions and the recommended future studies.
