As a buyer firm plans of strategizing its relationship with its major suppliers, a plethora of vital questions peep in the minds of the decision making managers: what are the pros and cons involved? How complex is the network environment? What will be the level of dependence? What are the alternatives? What is the risk involved? While searching for answers to these frequently asked questions, often one word keeps flashing in mind, 'network complexity' The word "network complexity" nowadays has become a very common vocabulary in supply chain parlance and frequently heard in managerial discussions on network issues. It has been highlighted as a major breeding ground of supply chain issues and conflicting network wide partner relationships (Gilmore 2008; Bode, Wagner 2015). One of the most vital and omnipresent stumbling blocks that stares glaringly at the managers before such decision making is, how complex is the system or the process or the network in the question? Thus, network complexity has become inherent to today's business scenarios, which cannot be avoided; rather understanding the complexity involved and quantifying it becomes vital for making effective and viable decisions aimed at managing complexity. In modern business setting the competition for competitive advantage and excellence has progressed to the very next level where the competition is no longer between firms, rather between their respective supply chains. However, this does not undermine the fact that complexity and conflicting interest mark most of the supply chain network relationships. Thus the challenges that the supply chain managers face these days are also unique and are actually a mix of three streams of highly sensitive balancing blocks which the managers should carefully balance without underestimating any of them. Those three stumbling blocks that managers face and need to manage and balance are: complexity management, risk assessment and last but not the least understanding the interdependence of their own firm's processes on their partner firm's processes. However the understanding of network complexity, here after interchangeably also referred to as supply chain complexity or in a even generic sense supply chain network complexity, needs revisiting for a better clarity. Thus this paper aims at first establishing a rational framework linking those three stumbling blocks that managers face in course of their day to day supply chain management duties and then progresses to empirically validate the hypothesized relationships based on perceptions of the industry practitioners (i.e. the managers); thereby aiming at providing supply chain managers with a handy empirically proved understanding framework indicating how perception about supply chain network complexity impacts inter-dependence and risk assessment between partners in the network.
