Supporting Cooperation between Supply Chain Members Through a Combination of Soft and Hard Coordination Tools

One of the most important tasks of supply chain management is to ensure that members cooperate properly. It is necessary to integrate value-adding processes, as this is the only way to maintain a high level of customer service. This is the way to create the value that the final customer will pay for and have his needs fully met. However, the question arises: do all companies really want to cooperate with each other at a high level? Alternatively, the question can be looked at from another angle: do all the links in the chain need to cooperate at a high level? The aim of this study is to examine to what extent corporate attitudes influence the form and extent of cooperation. To this end, the paper examines the use of contracting, one of the most popular instruments in the supply chain management literature. Using a case study, the result of the study is a composition matrix that shows the relationship between the preferred form of collaboration of companies and the contracts that best support this. To do this, it is first necessary to identify the possible forms of cooperation and their characteristics, after which the contracts and their conditions and characteristics of application must be understood. By putting the two pieces of information together, a matrix can be created, which can be used to recommend the most appropriate contract for the relationship that best matches the company's attitudes to improve cooperation and coordination between the members.