Collaborative manufacturing chains (CMSs) are understood as networks of manufacturing units that are highly specialized, cooperation-independent and economically autonomous. CMSs are becoming ever more complex in today’s global market and one pertinent task for supply chain designers/managers is to handle outsourcing decision-making problems, by which such complexity can be reduced. In this paper, we propose to solve this problem through generation of alternative collaborative manufacturing chains that are benchmarked using topological complexity metrics. For this purpose, firstly supply chain structures are modelled. Subsequently, topological complexity measures for each possible configuration network are quantified. Finally, optimal supply chain configurations are selected.