Purchasing theory… I have to admit it’s not one of my particular strongholds, but several of my readers and commenters have mentioned this article, most recently in a comment on A future research agenda for supply chain risk management, so I thought that perhaps I should have a look at it. After all, supplier relationships have been on my blog time and again , so why not? In their 2005 article  Risk-based classification of supplier relationships by a Finnish quartet from the Lappeenranann University of Technology, Jukka Hallikas, Kaisu Puumalainen, Toni Vesterinen and Veli-Matti Virolainen set out to develop a new classification scheme for suppliers, based on buyer dependency risk and supplier dependency risk.

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