The latest industrial trends are driving companies towards customer orientation, mass customization and digitalization, which call for a renewed view on supply chain risk management theory. This strategic evolution translates to the purchasing organization consolidating business and investing on fewer strategic suppliers with which to collaborate more closely in order to create more value. The new strategy underlines the significance of managing risk, and companies are renewing their attention on how to develop a structured process to assess risk. With a historically well-established risk management theory, recent literature has diverged in offering a vast range of application-specific proposals. This creates disconnect between theory and practice due to the lack of a general guideline that could inspire companies in setting up such a process. Moreover, qualitative studies have mainly focused on the buyer perspective of risk assessment and not given enough attention to the supplier perspective or to multiple-tier perspectives in a chain of complex relationships. In response to the above literature gap, the overarching theme of this dissertation is the need to build knowledge on how companies perceive supply risk and how this perception is changing with an evolving purchasing strategy. The principal objective is to deeply study this perception in the industry to better understand what are the underlying needs and challenges of the purchasing organization on how to assess supply risk. The study considers not only a buyers perspective but also a suppliers perspective, while it also extends the buyers risk visibility beyond the direct-flow supply base, i.e., beyond the first tier of the buyers upstream supply chain. In order to achieve this contribution to the literature, the research presented in this dissertation consists of a deep, explorative, empirical study that was carried out in collaboration with a multinational manufacturing firm from the white goods industry. The overall study was divided into three sequential phases, which resulted in the three papers that constitute the main structure of this dissertation. The first paper presents an observational report whereby this author participated over a two-year period in the company's purchasing organization and observed the evolving strategy on sourcing and in turn on risk assessment. The paper first provides a literature review retrospect on the evolution of supply chain risk management over the past few decades in connection to an evolving global market and industry. Subsequently, it presents the case company and describes in detail the empirically derived observation of how the purchasing organizations strategy evolved over this two-year period and how that affected their view on assessing supply risk. Following the above observational phase, the second paper frames a proposal for a novel methodology in carrying out a multiple case study with the objective to understand how risk is perceived and managed so far from both perspectives of buyers and suppliers. The proposal considers involving both buyers, i.e., purchasing managers, and suppliers of the case company in a study seeking to draw insight from their practical experience, in light also of the latest supply strategies discussed in the previous paper. Additionally, the proposed methodology aims to address multiple-tier risk by extending the scope to sub-suppliers. The third and final paper carries out the previously proposed multiple case study by interviewing a key selection of buyers and suppliers, thus studying both sides of the relationship, while also investigating risk over multiple supply tiers. The studys results are analyzed and discussed in detail, which provide useful implications and valuable insight on the current challenges of assessing risk in the industry status quo that should inspire further research in developing risk assessment theory in line with the new industrial trends.
The latest industrial trends are driving companies towards customer orientation, mass customization and digitalization, which call for a renewed view on supply chain risk management theory. This strategic evolution translates to the purchasing organization consolidating business and investing on fewer strategic suppliers with which to collaborate more closely in order to create more value. The new strategy underlines the significance of managing risk, and companies are renewing their attention on how to develop a structured process to assess risk. With a historically well-established risk management theory, recent literature has diverged in offering a vast range of application-specific proposals. This creates disconnect between theory and practice due to the lack of a general guideline that could inspire companies in setting up such a process. Moreover, qualitative studies have mainly focused on the buyer perspective of risk assessment and not given enough attention to the supplier perspective or to multiple-tier perspectives in a chain of complex relationships. In response to the above literature gap, the overarching theme of this dissertation is the need to build knowledge on how companies perceive supply risk and how this perception is changing with an evolving purchasing strategy. The principal objective is to deeply study this perception in the industry to better understand what are the underlying needs and challenges of the purchasing organization on how to assess supply risk. The study considers not only a buyers perspective but also a suppliers perspective, while it also extends the buyers risk visibility beyond the direct-flow supply base, i.e., beyond the first tier of the buyers upstream supply chain. In order to achieve this contribution to the literature, the research presented in this dissertation consists of a deep, explorative, empirical study that was carried out in collaboration with a multinational manufacturing firm from the white goods industry. The overall study was divided into three sequential phases, which resulted in the three papers that constitute the main structure of this dissertation. The first paper presents an observational report whereby this author participated over a two-year period in the company's purchasing organization and observed the evolving strategy on sourcing and in turn on risk assessment. The paper first provides a literature review retrospect on the evolution of supply chain risk management over the past few decades in connection to an evolving global market and industry. Subsequently, it presents the case company and describes in detail the empirically derived observation of how the purchasing organizations strategy evolved over this two-year period and how that affected their view on assessing supply risk. Following the above observational phase, the second paper frames a proposal for a novel methodology in carrying out a multiple case study with the objective to understand how risk is perceived and managed so far from both perspectives of buyers and suppliers. The proposal considers involving both buyers, i.e., purchasing managers, and suppliers of the case company in a study seeking to draw insight from their practical experience, in light also of the latest supply strategies discussed in the previous paper. Additionally, the proposed methodology aims to address multiple-tier risk by extending the scope to sub-suppliers. The third and final paper carries out the previously proposed multiple case study by interviewing a key selection of buyers and suppliers, thus studying both sides of the relationship, while also investigating risk over multiple supply tiers. The studys results are analyzed and discussed in detail, which provide useful implications and valuable insight on the current challenges of assessing risk in the industry status quo that should inspire further research in developing risk assessment theory in line with the new industrial trends.
Buyer vs Supplier Perspectives on Supply Risk Assessment: A Case Study from the White Goods Industry
KOSKINAS, STEFANOS
2020-07-16
Abstract
The latest industrial trends are driving companies towards customer orientation, mass customization and digitalization, which call for a renewed view on supply chain risk management theory. This strategic evolution translates to the purchasing organization consolidating business and investing on fewer strategic suppliers with which to collaborate more closely in order to create more value. The new strategy underlines the significance of managing risk, and companies are renewing their attention on how to develop a structured process to assess risk. With a historically well-established risk management theory, recent literature has diverged in offering a vast range of application-specific proposals. This creates disconnect between theory and practice due to the lack of a general guideline that could inspire companies in setting up such a process. Moreover, qualitative studies have mainly focused on the buyer perspective of risk assessment and not given enough attention to the supplier perspective or to multiple-tier perspectives in a chain of complex relationships. In response to the above literature gap, the overarching theme of this dissertation is the need to build knowledge on how companies perceive supply risk and how this perception is changing with an evolving purchasing strategy. The principal objective is to deeply study this perception in the industry to better understand what are the underlying needs and challenges of the purchasing organization on how to assess supply risk. The study considers not only a buyers perspective but also a suppliers perspective, while it also extends the buyers risk visibility beyond the direct-flow supply base, i.e., beyond the first tier of the buyers upstream supply chain. In order to achieve this contribution to the literature, the research presented in this dissertation consists of a deep, explorative, empirical study that was carried out in collaboration with a multinational manufacturing firm from the white goods industry. The overall study was divided into three sequential phases, which resulted in the three papers that constitute the main structure of this dissertation. The first paper presents an observational report whereby this author participated over a two-year period in the company's purchasing organization and observed the evolving strategy on sourcing and in turn on risk assessment. The paper first provides a literature review retrospect on the evolution of supply chain risk management over the past few decades in connection to an evolving global market and industry. Subsequently, it presents the case company and describes in detail the empirically derived observation of how the purchasing organizations strategy evolved over this two-year period and how that affected their view on assessing supply risk. Following the above observational phase, the second paper frames a proposal for a novel methodology in carrying out a multiple case study with the objective to understand how risk is perceived and managed so far from both perspectives of buyers and suppliers. The proposal considers involving both buyers, i.e., purchasing managers, and suppliers of the case company in a study seeking to draw insight from their practical experience, in light also of the latest supply strategies discussed in the previous paper. Additionally, the proposed methodology aims to address multiple-tier risk by extending the scope to sub-suppliers. The third and final paper carries out the previously proposed multiple case study by interviewing a key selection of buyers and suppliers, thus studying both sides of the relationship, while also investigating risk over multiple supply tiers. The studys results are analyzed and discussed in detail, which provide useful implications and valuable insight on the current challenges of assessing risk in the industry status quo that should inspire further research in developing risk assessment theory in line with the new industrial trends.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.