Obviously, selecting the right third-party logistics provider (3PL) for your supply chain is an important decision in supply chain risk management, but not every country decides in the same manner. While Americans focus on commitment, Germans appear to rely more on trust. Why is that?
Business relationships can make or break a company and Commitment Matters is a blog that will be of greatest interest to those who select, negotiate or manage relationships with trading partners – customers, suppliers, strategic alliances, teaming agreements or channels.
In this whitepaper by hiperos.com, supplier risk management is focused on four areas: the supplier’s viability, performance, compliance and corporate social performance. That is a perspective very much in line with my own ideas of holistic risk management and how a company should work with risk.
Supplier development and supplier performance are dependent on the current relationship life cycle phase. The different stages in the supplier relationship life cycle should play an important role in determining how the supply chain can be improved.
Is China really to blame for the 2007 recall crisis, or are the drivers and causes of this crisis originating from much closer to home? What can we learn from the toy industry?
Not only will this book help procurement professionals to lift their head from their desks and gain a wider perspective on possible ramifications of their purchasing decisions, it will also help top managers to seeing procurement as a crucial contributor to a company’s well-being and competitive advantage.
Supply chain risk management must look beyond the individual supplier and look at dependencies within the entire supplier portfolio. Such dependencies may not be obvious at first sight, and this paper presents one very good approach towards discovering these dependencies.
Guanxi: Connections and relations are what matter most, while contracts, rules and laws are to likely to be overridden if they are in conflict with harmonious relations.
Is culture shock the reason why so many global and cross-culture business relationships fail? When it comes to Western buyers and Chinese suppliers this may very well be the case, and while issues related to product quality or supplier reliability may seem as the obvious cause externally, cultural differences may be the root cause internally.
How do risks in supply relationships and and organizational learning play out in risk management when supply chain partners collaborate and develop a learning supply chain?
Supply chain collaboration, easy or difficult? And can it really work? In theory yes, but in reality? Maybe not.
Triads in supply networks: Theorizing buyer-supplier-relationships by Thomas Y Choi and Zhaohui Wu is a fascinating read and a brilliant attempt at classifying buyer-supplier triads into nine distinctively different configurations.
What do you when your major customer goes bust? How do you cope with finding a new business partner? How do you react when a major competitor is no more? SAAB is history. What will happen to its supply chain?
The overarching theme of this book is the development of supply chain relationships for better supply chain performance, and one of the best insurances against supply chain risk is developing relationships that perform well, in good times, and in bad times.
Apparently there must be something really special about Paul Kleindorfer. Otherwise there would be no reason for Morris A Cohen and Howard Kunreuther to write their tribute to him.
Supply management is not just about acquiring goods and services at the best possible price. It’s also about identifying possible disruptions to the supply chain and taking steps to mitigate them. While the article may be lacking in academic depth, it makes up for it in its hands-on managerial approach.
‘All firms are snakes’. So says Paul D. Cousins in A conceptual model for managing long-term inter-organisational relationships, published in 2002. ‘They are maximisers and satisfiers concerned with their own survival and self-interest’.
There are four situational factors that are important in supply chains, namely, the buyer, the supplier, the product bought, and the environment surrounding the purchase.
The perceived trust and the perceived dependence in business relationships influence the perceived vulnerability. The higher the perceived dependence, the higher the perceived vulnerability. The higher the perceived trust, the lower the perceived vulnerability.
My previous post was part three of a series based on the Swedish business continuity handbook titled “Säkra företagets flöden” and looked at a checklist or questionnaire that can be used in assessing particular disruption risks in your suppliers or sub-contractors. Today’s post will deal with different buyer- supplier relationships and how they can be categorized, and how such relationships may or may not contribute to supply chain disruptions.
