Monitoring partnership networks- A graph theory approach

Recently, companies are forming strong relationships with their strategic suppliers and customers in order to maximize their profit in the global market. Such a partnership or strategic alliance is based on the mutual needs of both parties. A partnership network is formed by different strategic firms (e.g., suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers) who intend to establish strong relationships together but without losing their ownership, power and control on the firm. For example, if supplier X has a strong relationship with customer Y and Y has a strong relationship with supplier Z, then X, Y and Z can form a partnership network with three nodes (X, Y and Z) and two edges (X ->Y and Z->Y). In this paper, we develop a statistical methods to study the normal behaviour of partnership networks. We furthermore develop a methodology that will help diagnose the nature of identified unusual network behavior.