Purchasing and suppliers are of major strategic importance to most companies today. This is because a substantial amount of the resources used by a company are made available through its suppliers. Purchases from suppliers account for more than half of total costs for most companies and in some industries, such as electronics, telecommunications, construction, and automotive, this portion is no...

In many important high-technology markets, including software development, data processing, communications, aeronautics, and defense, suppliers learn through experience how to provide better service at lower cost. This paper examines how a buyer designs dynamic competition among rival suppliers to exploit learning economies while minimizing the costs of becoming locked in to one producer. Strat...

Adopting a contingency framework, this paper explores consequences of manufacturing outsourcing and product/process newness for R&D–manufacturing coordination. Based on case-study findings, the following coordination challenges are outlined: accessing manufacturing competence and understanding suppliers’ processes (outsourcing of manufacturing and high newness); receiving feedback from supplier...

The rapid development of digital technologies can revolutionize industrial companies’ operations through the procurement and application solutions following a logic servitization. However, customers must refine their internal processes to exploit potential In this transition, organization is pivotal in orchestrating relationships between its functions supplier's ecosystems. Yet, t...

The Internet-driven electronic marketplace has been presented as a mean of enhancing collaboration between buyers and suppliers while generating significant advantages for both parties. Nevertheless, the introduction of online reverse auctions (ORA) in the negotiation process has been perceived as a resource that decreases inter-organizational trust, limiting the possibilities of collaboration....

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...

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...