The 2007 Procurement Challenge: A Competition to Evaluate Mixed Procurement Strategies

Global competition is putting a premium on the ability to manage risk through flexible and agile Web-enabled procurement practices. This article discusses the design of the 2007 “Supply Chain Management - Procurement Challenge” (SCM-PC), a competition designed by the first three au- thors to evaluate the performance of mixed procurement strategies that balance risk through com- binations of long-term, quantity-flexible contracts and one-off contracts. Specifically, the SCM-PC Challenge revolves around a PC assembly scenario, where Web-enabled trading agents developed by different teams compete for components required to assemble different types of PCs. Collec- tively the authors represent the top three entries in the 2007 Procurement Challenge. They present the strategies their teams developed for the competition, compare their performances, and discuss lessons learned from the competition.