مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد آماده شدن چالش رقابتی موضوع کنفرانس IPSERA

مقاله سال 2016

 مجله مدیریت خرید و تامین – Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management

The 24th IPSERA1 conference in Amsterdam was organised by the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of the VU University and the Faculty of Business and Economics of the Hungarian University of Pannonia in Veszprém.

The conference theme was “Preparing for new competitive challenges”. The theme refers to the various new competitive challenges organisations face, such as resource depletion, increasing demand in developing countries, increasingly demanding customers in traditional markets and increasing global competition. At the same time, organisations have to deal with a changing business or task environment (Wheelen et al., 2015), which has an impact on business policies and strategies, in line with the traditional strategic management literature (Johnson et al., 2008; Treacy and Wiersema, 1993). We know that the most critical factors or external forces that have an impact on the purchasing function and its policies and organisation are the degree of complexity and the dynamics, turbulence or volatility in the environment (Mintzberg, 1979; Emery and Trist, 1965; Gadde and Håkansson, 1993; Kamann et.al., 2001). The occurrence of these critical factors is exactly what has been taking place, especially after the financial crisis of 2009. Companies had to rapidly assess their strengths – and vulnerabilities – and act swiftly, often resulting in shifting production locations, technologies and organisational structures. During this period of reorientation of business activities and strategies, we observed a further increase in the role and centrality of logistics and concurrently an increased concentration in these logistic services, resulting from mergers and take-overs. Horizontal cooperation, mergers and take-overs are believed to be beneficial by actors in the sector (cf. Cruijssen et al., 2007; Verstrepen et al., 2009). We also observed that logistics services are increasingly combined with advanced IT services (LQ, 2007), where ‘track-and-trace’ is just one example. This applies both to consumer goods – with Amazon being the obvious example – and to business-to-business operations. While most models apply to ‘regular’ business flows and supply chains, we also find exceptions, like the increased attention to humanitarian supply chains requiring a tailored approach (Richardson et al., 2016).

These developments reflect a change in the causal texture of the business environment (Emery and Trist, 1965), but what does this all mean for the purchasing manager? What does it mean to the academic in the PSM field? While purchasing managers learned – or were conditioned – to see their business environment in terms of portfolio archetypes – either based on Kraljic (1983), Olsen and Ellram (1997) or Bensaou (1999) – in 1999, we described as part of a ‘vision for the future’ how suppliers would increasingly be forced to specialise into one of three possible supplier roles: broker, co-maker or capacity supplier, where logistics would be the ‘bonding agent’ between the various business processes. Fig. 1 shows these new roles, and this figure also incorporates the position on two axes: one that reflects the need for face-to-face contacts versus digital IT contacts, and one reflecting whether one is a virtual organisation in the extreme case or having in-house production. For logistics companies, actually, the same three roles would be valid: capacity suppliers – usually referred to as ‘wheels’ ‘mom-and-dad-stores’ or ‘1-car companies’ – co-makers providing total packages and brokerage roles just re-distributing, sub-contracting or – in more general terms – allocating tasks to capacity suppliers.