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In emergent countries, the globalization incentives enterprises of the several market sectors to elaborate strategic actions to maintain their competitive business in a dynamic context and widely complex. In Brazil, the most of the enterprises is classified as small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) according to number of employees and annual gross revenues. SME need to be agile and have the ability to develop a high level of resilience, mitigate the consequences of managerial risks, and increase structural flexibility that enables them to respond quickly to the challenges of the competitive marketplace (Ben-Daya, Hassini & Bahroun, 2019). This SME are responsible for 25% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (SEBRAE, 2019) of the country, generating business opportunities and new job openings in various productive sectors. Among of the productive sectors, the mineral industry sector represents one of the main activities of the Brazilian economy. In this sector, SMEs are encouraged to play participatory roles the Supply Chain Management (SCM), such as suppliers, transformers and customers, to develop strategies and control over the information and products flows throughout the supply chain of gypsum industry.
SCM is a management model that requires organizational changes in order to develop cooperation, communication and trust, enabling integration among all chain stakeholders (Braunscheidel, Suresh & Boisnier, 2010). Supply Chain Integration (SCI) is a competitive business approach and provides the integration of cultural, operational and technological aspects considered by the stakeholders. However, SCI has not been implemented as widely as expected in SMEs, in many cases due to the lack of methodologies adequate of this type of enterprise (Palomero & Chalmeta, 2014) This is one of the factors which difficult the understanding about characteristics structural, conduct and performance of the market.
In each of the constructs of structure, conduct and performance of the market, stakeholders assume managerial roles to direct the actions of the different institutions that belong to the supply chain. However, the stakeholder’s autonomy on decision-making requires that the norms, roles and responsibilities of each institution in SCI process are defined. So, some rules of behavior, relationship and communication must be followed to maintain the commercial balance between enterprises and government institutions, and to ensure the reduction of economic and social losses arising from the dynamism of the market. For this, Information Technology (IT) solutions can be support the description of SCI process for SMEs (Mishra & Mishra, 2009).
In this context, the public policies of the Brazilian government play an essential contribution in defining the guidelines for the mineral extraction market, and its inclusion as regulator of the SCI process is fundamental. The public policies define the regulated contributions of the behavior of each institution as agent of the market system. In this system, each agent exerts influence into interaction process and communication to ensure flow of information among different links in the supply chain, respecting the regulation of the public policies of the Gypsum Local Productive Arrangement (LPA), in context. However, the representation of this context can be complex. From this perspective, this work presents a conceptual model for the SCI of the Gypsum LPA using the normative multi-agent systems approach, considering the perspectives of communication, interaction and information flow to support the decision-making process of the main stakeholders.