Supply chain management is an increasingly important organizational concern, and proper management of supplier relationships constitutes one essential element of supply chain success (Fawcett and Fawcett, 1995; Giunipero and Brand, 1996). Buying firms faced with problems of deficient supplier performance and/or capabilities can implement a wide range of supplier development practices in order t...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine supplier selection among smalland medium-sized firms in the US textile and apparel industry. For smalland medium-sized firms, one powerful method of improving the firm’s competitiveness in the dynamic business environment is through strategic approach of supplier selection, which emphasizes supplier’s contributions to the total product...

We consider a single buyer who wishes to outsource a fixed demand for a manufactured good or service at a fixed price to a set of potential suppliers. We examine the value of competition as a mechanism for the buyer to elicit service quality from the suppliers. We compare two approaches the buyer could use to orchestrate this competition: (1) a Supplier-Allocation (SA) approach, which allocates...

We study a model of a firm managing its inventory of a single product by sourcing supplies from two supply sources, a regular supplier who offers a lower unit cost and a longer lead time than a second, emergency, supplier. A practically implementable policy for such a firm is a Tailored Base-Surge (TBS) Policy (Allon and Van Mieghem, 2010) to manage its inventory: Under this policy, the firm pr...

These day, supply chains (SCs) have become more and more complicated and have extensively expanded and due to these complexities, the supply chain management (SCM) has encountered several uncertainties, and, as a result, trust and assurance between members in SCs has become essential for a successful SCM. Although trust is an inevitable component in nearly all fields in SCs, like cooperation, c...

Apart from the familiar holdup problem, we investigate another implication of specific investment that has not been examined systematically in the literature. That is, the presence of specific investment can make a supplier vulnerable to large negative shocks to its customer’s business. In a theoretical model, we demonstrate that this vulnerability causes the supplier to under-invest. A higher ...

In most industries the cost of raw materials and component parts constitutes the main cost of a product, such that in some cases it can account for up to 70%.In such circumstances decision making of purchasing management can play a key role in cost reduction. In today’s highly competitive environment, an effective supplier selection process is very important to the success of any manufacturing ...

We consider supplier development within a supply chain consisting of a single manufacturer and a single supplier. Because investments in supplier development are usually relationship-specific, safeguard mechanisms against the hazards of partner opportunism have to be installed. Here, formal contracts are considered as the primary measure to safeguard investments. However, formal contracts entai...

Cooperative Information Systems implement cross-organization processes by exchanging information among each other in a mutual supplier--customer relationship. With respect to the quality of the information received, each customer system has requirements that must be met by its supplier systems. In this paper, we model the quality profile associated to a supplier as a multidimensional data cube,...