Einkauf, Logistik und Supply Chain Management – serie

Supply management has received increased attention both in research and practice only recently. For decades, purchasing management was considered one of the least complex business functions. However, in a world of decreasing in-house value add in nearly all industries, it has become strategically critical for most companies to pay closer attention to purchasing spend. Many companies found that there is a lot more to have from suppliers than "the right goods at the right place at the right time". Several researchers investigating the transition from traditional purchasing to strategic supply management found a discrepancy between the general discussion of strategic supply management and reality in most companies. Given the well-known examples of high-performing purchasing organizations and the myriade of books both by researchers and practitioners on what good practices in supply management look like, this is an interesting observation. This dissertation investigates reasons for this discrepancy to help companies overcome the barriers of purchasing evolution. Michael Stolle combines organizational theories on organizational learning, resource-based view, and principal-agent conflicts to explain the challenges such a profound change of mindsets and culture presents. He develops a theoretical framework of purchasing evolution that shows the complex interactions of different driving factors that have to go together to make a successful transition possible. Finally, an interview-based empirical study is used to verify this framework empirically.

Die vorliegende Arbeit verbindet zwei Themen, zu denen jeder Manager oder Berater auf Grund tiefer praktischer Einblicke eine Meinung hat: Einkauf und Hotels. Jeder kennt die Aussage: „Im Einkauf liegt der Gewinn.“ Jeder versucht, bei der Hotelbuchung den besten Preis auszuhandeln. Jeder Gast hat höchste Ansprüche an Räume, Ausstattung, Servicequalität und Hotelpersonal – unabhängig vom bezahlten Preis. Dies gilt erst recht für den Hotelbesuch im gehobenen Preissegment ab 3 Sterne. Christine Schüffler beleuchtet dieses Spannungsfeld mit unmittelbarer Auswirkung auf die Profitabilität von Hotel erstmals in diesem Umfang wissenschaftlich. Die Arbeit untersucht den Status Quo von Einkauf und Supply Management in einer besonders dienstleistungsintensiven Branche – der Hotellerie in Deutschland. Basis der Arbeit ist eine empirische Untersuchung deutscher Drei- bis Fünf-Sterne-Hotels, die am Supply Management Institute (SMI) der European Business School (EBS) 2006 abgeschlossen wurde und derzeit bereits zum zweiten Mal durchgeführt wird. Ganzheitliches Supply Management gewinnt in einer Informations- und Dienstleistungsgesellschaft zunehmend weit über klassische Anwendungsfelder und Branchen hinaus an Bedeutung. In Bezug auf dienstleistungsintensive Branchen wie Tourismus oder Hotellerie wird ein Nachholbedarf bezüglich des vorhandenen und angewandten Managementwissens deutlich. Gerade moderne Methoden und strategische Ansätze in Einkauf und Supply Management werden häufig nicht hinreichend berücksichtigt – und bleiben als Effizienztreiber daher unberücksichtigt. Bisher liegen kaum empirische Untersuchungen oder theoretische Konzepte zu diesem Thema vor. Christine Schüffler bearbeitet damit ein sowohl aus Sicht der Forschung als auch aus Sicht derPraxis relevantes Thema.

Foreword Among researchers in the business and management disciplines, there is some kind of a common understanding that research should provide models, concepts and solutions for practical problems. In other words: research is practice-oriented and, personally, I subscribe to this maxim. Still, sometimes, it is important to pause for a moment and reflect upon one’s own activities. The present thesis is one of those comparatively few pieces of research that do so by dealing with the scientific side of research and by asking a number of questions that target at the identification of the nature of a very recent subfield within business and management, namely Supply Chain Management. In particular, the author seeks to understand the processes that characterize the evolution of Supply Chain Management research throughout the past sixteen years and reflects upon avenues for future research - feeling that SCM research seems to have come to a crossroads. The systematic reprocessing of Supply Chain Management literature and the methodologically sound approach are impressive and enable Julia Wolf to contribute a valuable component to scientific practice and debate in this area. Her work also illustrates that, in terms of philosophical underpinnings, research in Supply Chain Management is still at the very beginning and I hope that this thesis gives rise to more work of similar kind.

Foreword In today’s markets, companies face ever growing international competition, radical technological change, and increasingly demanding customers. These developments force managers to focus on core competencies and result in decreasing in-house val- add across industries. Adequate supplier selection and competent management of the supply base have thus become key firm success factors. As a consequence, purchasing and supply management (PSM) has developed into a powerful weapon for contributing to a firm’s competitive advantage along dimensions such as cost, quality, and inno- tion. Such a contribution, however, critically depends upon the alignment of purch- ing strategies and practices with the company’s overall business strategy. Only if the purchasing function supports the firm’s competitive position can it effectively improve profitability. Unfortunately, existing research still lacks both the theoretical concepts and empirical foundation to provide detailed guidance to practitioners regarding how such alignment can be achieved and what impact it should have on firm performance. The doctoral thesis presented by Christian Baier develops and tests a comprehensive model of the alignment-performance link in PSM in order to close this knowledge gap. Drawing on insights from the market-based view, the resource-based view, princip- agent theory, and contingency theory, the author derives a solid theoretical understa- ing of the relationships between business strategy and strategies and practices at the functional level. By applying the theory of production competence to the PSM context, two critical levels of alignment are identified: strategic alignment, i. e.

In other words, those managers who systematically study the future have also the power to shape and influence the future. Against this background, there is a considerable need for futures orientation and innovation in logistics in order to establish flexibility, creativity, and the ability to adapt to changes quickly.

Although services make up an increasingly larger share of global economies, how to source services is still a rather scarcely investigated field. The p- chasing of services from an international supplier landscape has increased dramatically in the last years, but this practical relevance has not yet echoed in academic research fully. The academic, professional and also political discussions around terms and phenomena such as “offshoring” are still ch- acterized by a lack of clarity and delimitation of (seemingly) competing terms. Another issue worth highlighting in this field is that despite the g- graphical dimension of this topic, how to best source certain complex service categories, such as for example marketing services, is still particularly under researched. Therefore, the dissertation of Ms Bals was on the one hand particularly concerned with bringing clarity into these terminological issues in the field of international sourcing of services. On the other hand, it focused to further develop the field of complex categories by highlighting specific aspects of sourcing marketing services. These goals have been accomplished exc- lently. Prof. Dr. Christopher Jahns Acknowledgements First and foremost I would like to take the opportunity to state my thanks to the people, who have significantly supported and enabled this thesis.

Der Logistiker sieht die Welt durch die Brille der Logistik, kalkuliert auch private Termine mit Zeitpuffern oder just-in-time, Grenzen der Anwendbarkeit scheinen nicht vorhanden. Und tatsächlich: Logistische Prinzipien vereinen Effektivitäts- und Effizienzdenken, stetiger W- del ist zu antizipieren, neue Konzepte sind an Kundenanforderungen anzupassen. Logistik und IT determinieren in Industrie und Handel den Erfolg des Kerngeschäfts der Unternehmen. Die Logistik ist – wissenschaftlich und praktisch – aber unter Berücksichtigung spezifischer R- menbedingungen zunehmend auch auf Dienstleistungsunternehmen wie Banken und Ver- cherungen, jedoch gerade auch für den öffentlichen Sektor übertragbar. Die vorliegende Dissertation ist ein Beispiel für die zunehmende wissenschaftliche Bearb- tung dieser neuen Themenfelder. Sie beschäftigt sich mit der Dokumentenlogistik in der - fentlichen Verwaltung und adressiert dabei ein hoch relevantes und aktuelles Phänomen für Wissenschaft und Praxis: Die Relevanz der Ressource Information und des mit ihr einher- henden Wissens wird in der Privatwirtschaft aber auch in öffentlichen Institutionen immer deutlicher, sodass Informationen und Daten in Form von papiergebundenen oder digitalen Dokumenten ständig gezielt abrufbereit vorgehalten werden müssen. Folglich gewinnt die Betrachtung der physischen und elektronischen Dokumentenflüsse in privatwirtschaftlichen Unternehmen und öffentlichen Institutionen aus einer logistischen Perspektive seit einigen Jahren zunehmend an Bedeutung. Aus diesem Zusammenhang entstehen neue Aufgaben- und Funktionsfelder sowie neue Formen der Kooperation und Interaktion für die Logistik.

Performance Measurement is currently one of the most talked about topics in Purchasing and Supply Management (PSM) – in research as well as in business practice. However, it is not simply a business fad; researchers already introduced the Balanced Scorecard, a performance measurement method, to PSM a few years ago. A more novel idea in this context is measuring the budget impact of PSM – its financial effectiveness. In business practice, only 10-20% of supply management’s effectiveness can be identified retrospectively in the P&L account with current measurement methods. Thus, PSM is often criticised for only being able to demonstrate its efforts on presentation charts, so-called “powerpoint savings”. Therefore, researchers were requested to support practitioners in finding a solid and feasible solution to the problem of savings measurement. The derived solution measures PSM’s financial effectiveness by integrating the function in the budgeting procedure, based on the following hypothesis: Only when supply management addresses its planned savings potential already in the budgets, it can show its comprehensive bottom line effect.

Roger Moser analyses the relationships between business priorities and PSM strategy and shows in detail how business strategies influence PSM. He develops a PSM strategy concept which enables supply managers to break down strategic priorities from a business strategy level to a PSM level and to define appropriate actions when dealing with suppliers, supply markets and internal customers.

Low-cost country sourcing has for long been one of the hottest buzz words in the purchasing and supply management community, especially among practitioners. The lack of coverage in the academic field can potentially be explained by the complexity and the breadth of the topic. Although companies in most industries have sourced on a global level for decades or even centuries in order to reduce cost, the subject have received increasing attention over the last few years in a sense that the concept has become more and more institutionalized as part of the overall sourcing strategy. The developments are welcome – especially since the field of purchasing and supply management traditionally has been lagging behind other, more “acknowledged” disciplines such as finance, accounting, and marketing, among others. This lag is glaring if one considers the absence of faculties involved in the discipline among many universities. Therefore, the initiative of Supply Management Institute to build a worldwide research and training network has proven to be highly attractive for both scholars and practitioners. Furthermore, the discipline has also become increasingly complex due to globalization effects, where business networks become increasingly intertwined and the flow of goods, services, money and human capital grow exponentially over time. To handle the situation, companies are in desperate need for knowledge and information that can help them to crafting effective strategies that can secure supply, reduce risk and ultimately translate into competitive advantage.