a best-worth method to implement bi-lateral contracts with essential barriers

In some bi-lateral alliances, firms coordinate their interactions in supply chain management (scm) via contracts. although such a contractual approach is common in the community of scm both in industry and academia, successful implementation of contracts in bi-lateral alliances remains challenging in practice because of the incomplete identification of implementation barriers by firms involved in the alliance. this paper investigates the implementation issues of bi-lateral contracts. to identify the barriers, the literature and interview experts of the subject matter are reviewed. by adopting the novel “best-worst” prioritization method, we evaluate the main barriers firms face in the successful implementation of contracts discovered in our identification phase. to validate the findings, a list of barriers is applied to assess a set of firms in the iranian auto industry and locate more prepared firms as future partners of potential bi-lateral alliances. the results are consistent with the common intuition toward these sample firms in the case study.