Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships among suppliers’ trust and commitment, transaction-specific investment, switching cost, and customer involvement within the context of relational governance mechanism and the social exchange theory. Design/methodology/approach – The authors use survey data from 214 Chinese manufacturing firms and employ the structural equat...

This paper proposes the application of market-based workflow management for enabling a new form of relationship between customer and suppliers of services. This form is more flexible than the usual long-term fixed relationship with single partners. It allows customers to coordinate their processes with the services operated by the suppliers while still benefiting from a market competition enhan...

The suppliers selection is a multiple attribute decision making (MADM) problem. Since the decision maker (DM)s like preferences on alternatives or on attributes of suppliers are often uncertain, and thus the selection of good suppliers becomes more difficult. Grey theory is one of the methods that are used to study uncertainty, it is superior in mathematical analysis of systems with uncertain i...

We consider a buyer who outsources the manufacturing of a product to multiple symmetric make-to-stock suppliers who compete on price and service (fill rate). The buyer allocates demand to the suppliers using a score function with an exponential form, which specifies the relative importance of price vs. service, in order to minimize his costs, while the suppliers choose their prices and fill rat...

With growingworldwide awareness of environmental protection, green production has become an important issue for almost every manufacturer and will determine the sustainability of a manufacturer in the long term. A performance evaluation system for green suppliers thus is necessary to determine the suitability of suppliers to cooperate with the firm. While the works on the evaluation and/or sele...

Partnerships and collaborations between companies (OEMs) and suppliers are not new. Many companies rely on partnerships with key suppliers to improve operational effectiveness through minimized inventory, information and culture integration to boost their lean/ agile credentials. The Fractal Manufacturing Partnership (FMP) is new manufacturing strategy, whereby OEMs form relationship with key s...

In this paper we consider a single buyer who wants to outsource the manufacturing of aproduct to N potential suppliers. The buyer’s objective is to maximize the service level shereceives from the suppliers. The suppliers compete for the buyer’s demand based on acompetition parameter which the buyer announces along with an allocation rule. We modeleach supplier as a make-to-s...

In this paper the importance and the effects of technological opportunities, stemming from academic research, on the innovation activities of firms in the German automobile supply industry are investigated. We observe that the contribution of academic research to firms’ innovation activities is less important than the relevance of industrial sources but yet, the most likely partners for formal ...

Business-to-government (B2G) electronic auction (e-auction) markets are increasingly being used to create opportunities for suppliers to expand their market as well as trading activities. However, little has been done to understand the behaviour of suppliers participating in these markets. In this paper, we propose a framework to explain suppliers’ intention to participate, and the level of par...

Nowadays, many manufacturing companies have decided to use other companies’ competencies and outsource part of their manufacturing processes and business to suppliers globally in order to reduce costs, improve quality of products, explore or expand new markets, and offer better services to customers, etc. The decisions have rendered manufacturing organizations with new challenges. Organizations...