TY  - CHAP
A1  - Buchholz, Wolfgang
A1  - Kappel, Antonia
A1  - Schiele, Holger
T1  - Cost versus Innovation Leaders: When do they need Supply Network Mapping?  The impact of SNM on purchasing performance
T2  - IPSERA Conference proceedings
N2  - Buying firms lack transparency about the supplier relationships in their networks. The applica-tion of dedicated tools such as Supply Network Mapping (SNM) can help to visualize and analyze these relationships. However, the impact of such tools on the purchasing performance has not been explored yet. Moreover, companies with different competitive strategies might have different motivations to use these tools. Therefore, this paper tests the impact of supplier relationship information and SNM on the purchasing performance on a large sample of 624 purchasers. A multi-group analysis in structural equation modeling estimates the impact of a cost leadership versus a differentiation strategy on cost saving and innovation performance. We show that information quality and SNM indeed improve the purchasing performance. Moreover, cost leaders use SNM if they know their supplier relationships with sub-suppliers, while innovation leaders use it if they know their supplier relationships with other customers. Hence, our results prove the usefulness of the SNM tool and give recommendations for its use depending on a company’s competitive strategy.
Y1  - 2019
SP  - 1
EP  - 19
ER  - 
TY  - CHAP
A1  - Buchholz, Wolfgang
A1  - Kappel, Antonia
A1  - Schiele, Holger
T1  - Knowing your suppliers: people or media as key sources of information?
T2  - IPSERA Conference proceedings
N2  - Most companies have realized the high importance of becoming the preferred customers of their suppliers to obtain preferential resource allocation. However, they cannot evaluate their own customer attractiveness properly. In order to make the assessment of the own customer status possible, this paper analyzes the impact of several information sources on the preferred customer status knowledge, supplier satisfaction knowledge and knowledge of alternative supplier relationships with other customers. Testing these hypotheses on a sample of 624 pur-chasers, we show that people provide more relevant information on the company’s strategic positioning than media. In particular, the suppliers, competitors and other actors are very im-portant information sources. Following our findings, purchasers should adopt their activities in order to better anticipate their suppliers’ intention and the customer treatment that they can expect from their suppliers.
Y1  - 2019
SP  - 1
EP  - 21
ER  -