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To increase maturity within purchasing and supply management (PSM), future purchasing skills are needed based on the technological development towards Industry 4.0. Past research, eg, the work of Bals, Schulze, Kelly, and Stek (2019), started to address this issue based on literature review and interview studies. However, a detailed description of these skills is missing. Utilizing a real-time Delhi study with 45 experts within the PSM field, nine future purchasing skills have been elaborated. Identified skills connect to the maturing and emerging technologies within purchasing and provide a guideline towards Industry 4.0 in purchasing based on a human-centric perspective.
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.
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.
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.
Ecosystem Emergence and Founding Conditions - Lessions Learned from an Imprinting Perspective
(2022)
The rise of ecosystem prominence has provided several definitions of how we understand ecosystems nowadays. In this context, several scholars have considered influencing factors for ecosystem emergence. This paper addresses this consideration and analyzes the salient characteristics of different ecosystem types and their potential persistence since ecosystem founding to improve the understanding of emergence. We applied a three-step approach (1) identifying ecosystem types based on bibliometric analysis, (2) exploring salient characteristics per ecosystem type using qualitative content analysis and (3) deriving founding conditions from the salient characteristics following a conceptual approach. Based on a bibliometric analysis, we identified business/innovation, entrepreneurial and service ecosystems. In a second step, we developed salient characteristics within the themes of structure, power constellation/interdependencies and governance by inductive coding. As we identified a significant difference in alignment structure, we analyzed if alignment structure persists since ecosystem origin and explains why ecosystems differ. We analyzed potential pairings between alignment structure and their respective founding condition for every ecosystem type. With the alignment structures’ persistence, we can better understand why ecosystem types differ.
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.
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.
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.
Particularly in times of disruptive changes, companies need an early warning system for risks in their supply chains to gain relevant information in a timely manner. Furthermore, they require suitable action plans and strategies to help react when a risk occurs. Based on an in-depth case study at an automotive parts supplier producing electronic systems and lighting components, this paper develops a holistic supply chain risk management framework. After investigating the specific supply chain risks to support critical parts management, standardised processes and procedures are developed to improve the preventive supply chain risk strategy cycle, as well as the reactive critical parts management cycle.
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.