Open Access

Wolfgang Buchholz, Antonia Kappel, Holger Schiele

• Focal companies are embedded in complex supply networks consisting of various suppliers, customers, competitors and complementors. The activities of these actors influence the com-petitive position of the focal companies. Some customers achieve preferred customer status and gain preferential treatment, others have to restrain to being standard customers getting less privileged services. Consequently, buying companies in such markets have to achieve transparency about the relationships of their suppliers towards their competitors and comple-mentors in order to map them and to analyse their impact. Current literature lacks a holistic approach to capture these relationships. In which sources can the focal companies find the desired information? Which kind of information do they really need? And in which situations is the need for transparency high and when is it low? The aim of this research is to examine these relationships using a World Café method with purchasers for data gathering followed by a Gioia method to structure the qualitative data. The result is a list of desired knowledge cov-ering business, supplier and collaboration details; a set of information sources clustered in pub-lished and unpublished sources as well as contingency factors regarding general conditions, changes and particular occasions that require a high supplier relationship knowledge. All an-swers have been rated by their importance during the World Café. The answers can help to operationalise the mapping of supplier relationships towards competitors and complementors in order to assess the own customer status compared to other customers.