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Specifying roles in purchasing and supply management in the era of Industry 4.0: A Delphi study
(2021)
New technologies and systems within the field of purchasing and supply management (PSM) call forth responsibilities and require expertise. Moving towards Industry 4.0 in purchasing, increasing attention on specialization within talent and skills, where human capital is needed to exploit the full potential of technologies. Based on an internet-based real-time Delhi study with 47 experts within the PSM field, six future purchasing roles have been defined and elaborated. These future roles connect to the maturing and emerging technologies within the purchasing field and provide a guideline to further develop towards Industry 4.0 in purchasing based on a human-centered evolutionary approach.
The opportunity to anticipate delivery failures, shortages or delays in company’s upstream supply chains at an early stage facilitates to take preventive countermeas-ures to mitigate potential damage. However, data-driven predictive technologies such as machine learning (ML) are rarely examined in supply chain risk management (SCRM). The purpose of the following paper is to present a framework of design principles for the application of ML in SCRM. The foundation of this framework is an action design research (ADR) project, which is performed in collaboration with the SCRM department of an automotive company. A predictive ML model is developed and evaluated in collaboration with the company. Based on the findings and observa-tions made during the project, general design principles are derived and grouped by the three interrelated elements of organisation, development and operation, which are to be considered when applying ML in SCRM. Finally, the derived elements and the corresponding design principles are discussed and justified with reference to the literature.
Managing the Supply-Side of Digital Platforms: First Insights from the Financial Services Sector
(2020)
The aim of this paper is to contribute knowledge on the interface and relationship be-tween digital platforms in the financial services sector and the service providers on its supply-side. Based on an explorative research design with literature research and three expert interviews, we examine the categories of service providers that can be distin-guished, the factors of influence that are relevant for selecting service providers, and the main benefits and risks for partnerships with service providers. The results are a starting point for deeper investigation and the creation of research questions for future projects in other industries.
The financial services sector is undergoing a digital transformation. But the emerging picture is very different from the innovation-driven revolution that was initially expected.
Due to the variety of challenges, banks and mostly young financial technology companies (fintechs) are increasingly cooperating instead of competing. Yet despite the rapidly growing importance of bank-fintech cooperation, there is still a lack of empirical evidence on the determinants. We use an explorative research design and conduct semi-structured interviews to contribute to this research field. Our findings illustrate that banks are primarily concerned with access to innovation, while fintechs mainly focus on balancing their resource constraints.
While the service sector is growing rapidly, the purchasing of services has not yet received significant attention in theory or practice. Service purchasers face serious challenges, and existing purchasing practices for services are often non-strategic. We choose an exploratory–qualitative research approach to investigate the purchasing of IT, logistics and Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) services. In particular, we focus on the role of visibility and analyze how service purchasers can benefit from extensive knowledge about their service networks. We determine that visibility indeed adds significant value to service purchasing and can help service purchasers to decrease costs, mitigate risks and maintain competitiveness.
The global development towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the so-called Industry 4.0, is steaming forwards. Where cyber-physical systems connect the physical and digital world, allowing for demand identification, without the need for direct human intervention. Further, Artificial Intelligence supports various parts of operative and strategic purchasing. The new purchasing environment forces purchasing professionals to develop new skills. Research is needed to identify appropriate skill sets. Based on a World-Café method with 82 purchasing professionals, a list of 32 essential future skills in purchasing is composed. Further, the identified skills are ranked and assigned to the roles of the direct and indirect material purchasers.
Nowadays, the human-centric discipline of purchasing and supply management (PSM) is of strategic importance for firms’ success. Within the discipline, scholars address PSM professionals’ skills and provide practitioners with academic insights. Due to changes in the industry environment, changes in the working environment and the task of purchasing professionals are assumed. This paper aims to contribute to the PSM professional skills literature by defining current PSM professionals’ skill gaps as the difference between the acquired skill level and perceived skill importance. Findings show that current PSM professionals feel to be underqualified to abstract the full potential of professional relationships, as buyer-supplier relationships, due to current PSM professionals’ skill gaps.
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.
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.
One way or another – The relationship between trust and transparency in buyer-supplier relationships
(2019)
Based on a variety of environmental, technological, and product-orientated changes, there has been a shift towards increased collaboration between buyers and suppliers. This paper examines the mutual influence of trust and transparency at different developmental stages of these collaborative relations. In particular, the research investigates the existence of a direct correlation between trust and transparency, as well as indirect dependencies to each other through environmental factors. An extensive literature review combined with an exploratory-qualitative World Café method was conducted in an attempt to fill the research gap regarding the correlation of trust and transparency in buyer-supplier relationships.