Supply chain broker operations: a network perspective

methods Recent work in social network analysis has examined performance of various organizations from a network perspective. This paper presents a network analysis of spot-market broker operations in supply chain management, based on findings from our empirical study of a specific firm in the industry. By modeling the connections between the brokers and the vendors they contact, we define metrics that correlate the strategies for selecting the vendors with profitability, which allows for the identification of potentially good operating policies. We find that it is not just the number of connections between brokers and vendors that impact profitability, but also the quality of those connections. We develop an approach to quantify the quality of connections and demonstrate the extent to which this approach can not only predict system performance but also serve as a tool to evaluate the performance of individual brokers