A Semantic Sense & Respond Approach to IT-enabled Buyer-Supplier Relationship Management: An Action Research Study

The importance of buyer-supplier relations has been recognized by research as well as practice. Information sharing and knowledge exchange have been found to positively impact closer collaboration, increase transparency, and improve perceptions of trust between buyers and sellers. There is however, lesser research about IT as an enabler in the dynamics of buyer-seller relationship management. Against this backdrop, we examine how a retailer leveraged and adapted a portal to help them “listen to the voice of their suppliers”. Through a collaborative action research project, we developed a semantic sense & respond approach to design and implement mechanisms that allowed a large retailer, BuildSmart, to continuously sense how their portal was experienced by suppliers and how to more generally improve their relationship with their suppliers. As a result, we present a conceptual model of IT-enabled buyer-supplier relationship management, and demonstrate how semantic modeling can be combined with sense & response thinking to support adaptive technology management.