Essays on Supply Chain Management – serie

​Sustainability advanced to an omnipresent topic among academics and business leaders, while at the same time, a growing share of a firm’s total expenditure accounts for purchased products and materials. Even though suppliers become increasingly important for their buyers with regards to sustainability, academic research still lacks a detailed understanding of how sustainability considerations affect the relationship between buyers and suppliers. Thomas Leppelt contributes to extant sustainability literature across the research disciplines of supply chain management, management and marketing by cross-functionally investigating the effects of sustainability on supplier-buyer relationships from both a supplier and a buyer perspective. The results of in total three academic articles provide valuable insights on how buyers as well as suppliers deal with sustainability upstream and downstream the supply chain. The results indicate that sustainability leaders, in contrast to sustainability followers, intensively invest in sustainable supplier relationship management practices. Moreover, a became evident that the effective marketing of sustainability-related capabilities enhances a supplier’s reputation and can render comparative advantages, if it sends consistent positive signals to the market and if it integrates purchasing and marketing in the context of sustainability.

Micha Hirschinger emphasizes the importance of foresight on logisticsand institutions in particular for effective decision making as distinctresearch in this context is limited. He applies a systematic and transferablemulti-method approach based on Delphi studies and fuzzy c-means cluster analysisto develop profound scenarios for the future. He uses the relevance ofinformation-processing requirements to investigate whether centralization ofpurchasing organizations increases functional efficiency. The author finallyshows how a sharing-economy business model transfer could help to overcome thelimited access to factor markets, especially trucks, at the base of thepyramid.

The recent past has seen a growing interest in supply chain management (SCM) topics. Despite the vast amount of published supply chain research, the need for the further refinement of SCM tools is even more relevant today. Numerous studies show that the theoretical SCM concepts still lack practical implementation in today’s business world. Through the empirical validation of SCM models and in-depth case studies, Daniel Kern provides an answer on how to implement the theoretical concepts into the day-to-day business of multinational corporations. The four essays cover research on inter-firm collaboration, supply risk management, purchasing competences and research on measuring and benchmarking SCM efforts.

Internationalization of business activities has become one of the main fields of interest in management research, influencing a broad range of academic areas such as strategic management, organizational science, operations management or economic institutions. In recent years the pace of internationalization has even increased. With his four essays on distinctive levels of International Entrepreneurship, Gordian Rättich provides an answer on some of the most essential challenges for entrepreneurial firms and shows how social groups, economic institutions and nations manage to overcome the challenges of internationalization and gain competitive advantages.