Open Access

Wolfgang Buchholz, Antonia Kappel, Holger Schiele

• 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.