Norma Harrison

Purpose: Nowadays, companies compete and win based on the capabilities they can leverage across their supply chains. With unpredictable and turbulent business environment, supply chains are seeking to customer knowledge as sources of competitive advantage. The purpose of this paper is to empirically test a conceptual framework to investigate the roles of customer leverage (CL) on process innovation and the relationships to performance. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing upon the knowledge-based view, this study argues that CL is the sources of firms’ process innovation. This study also posits that process innovation mediates the relationship between CL and performance based on transaction cost economics. This empirical study employed 650 manufacturers across different regions. Findings: This study showed that strong association exists between a manufacturing firm’s CL capability and its process innovation and performances. Process innovation play critical mediating roles in absorbing and transforming customer knowledge in supply chains. In a more dynamic market, CL strengthens the positive impacts on process innovation. Research limitations/implications: This study further highlights the need to emphasize both strategic and CL capability in dynamic environments as these may be needed to enable the firm to seize market niches that may open up in such environments. Similarly, managers should emphasize CL capability and process changes in competitive environments as they are more difficult to imitate from competitors in regards of new product or services. Practical implications: These results extend the limited existing research on global manufacturing context that the customer knowledge are effective sources for increasing innovative processes. The higher the market turbulence, the stronger the pressures for CL demanded by process innovation. The findings also confirm that process innovation plays a mediating role in absorbing and transforming customer knowledge in improving costs and financial measures. This is an important result that highlights the mechanism by which customer knowledge can influence a firm’s bottom line. Originality/value: This study examined the linkages between a marketing concept and operations and supply chain management.

A supply chain triad is increasingly regarded as a unit of analysis of complex supply chain networks, allowing the realization of properties such as certain risks manifesting at the level of supply chain networks, and which are not necessarily observed at the level of supply chain dyads or individual supply chain partners. This study investigates a type of supply chain triad - service triads - and explores cross- organizational pathways according to which risks can emerge and propagate within such triadic structures. The aim of the study is to design an analytical model with the view to facilitate the assessment of vulnerability in service triads according to the aforementioned cross-organizational pathways of risk emergence and propagation. Using graph theory, a range of service triad reference models are developed, which formalize the typology and direction of the relationships between members of the supply chain triad. Adopting the notion of matrix permanent allows calculating the vulnerability levels of distinct service triad models, accounting for the formalized typology and direction of the relationships within the models. A case study in a corporate bonds context is conducted to illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach to vulnerability assessment in the service industry context.

Research in Operations and Supply Chain Management (OSCM) field is widespread and applied to various sectors of industry and services. Despite its benefits, the diversity of the worldviews of OSCM research applications and the preferences regarding the choice of methodologies by the researchers sometimes cause unnecessary complexities in converging these efforts toward advancing theory and practice. It has been argued that the application of multi-methods could facilitate obtaining a common ground through which OSCM researchers could make more effective and robust contributions in binding theory and practice. There is, however, a lack of a unifying research methodology so that OSCM research could effectively link between theory and practice and move toward more coherence of research in the OSCM field. In this article, we introduce the application of design science research methodology and the use of multi-methods approach in this methodology to draw a road map for more coherent future research attempts in the domain of OSCM. As an example, the behavioral causes of the bullwhip effect are examined and illustration is made on how the dispersed but growing research efforts in this area could be aligned into drawing a behavioral theory of the ordering preferences of decision makers in supply chains and in organizations.

Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM) is pivotal in order to realize the vision of the Brundtland Report. Publications related to SSCM have dramatically increased in the last few years. Recent review papers show that most of the SSCM literature still focuses on the environmental dimension, and social issues are not adequately addressed. In addition, reviewers have analysed many other aspects such as modelling techniques and research methodologies. A "review paper" is needed to investigate the efforts made to operationalize sustainability in each supply chain process, i.e., planning, procurement, manufacturing, transportation, warehousing and reverse logistics. This is especially as sustainable development can only be achieved if measures are taken along the supply chain. In this paper, we investigate the current status of SSCM research with the lens of the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) Process Model. This study systematically examines relevant publications from 1992 to 2012 by employing this rigorous analytical methodology. It provides thorough descriptive analysis and also presents major sustainability categories and themes (or topics) covered by the SSCM publications specific to each supply chain process. It clearly highlights the gaps and presents the opportunities for further research.1 page(s

Supplier Integration in the Chinese Automotive Industry: 10.4018/978-1-61692-862-9.ch002: Supplier integration has become an important concept for improving supply chain performance in networked industries, such as the automotive industry. The aim

This paper seeks to develop a supplier integration framework in a Chinese context based on existing theories and empirical insights from the Chinese automotive industry. The objective is to develop a framework and identify a number of factors that can potentially facilitate supplier integration and ultimately improve supply chain performance. The framework comprises a causal chain with four key constructs, starting with supply chain leadership as an antecedent to alliance readiness, which in turn is proposed to yield a higher degree of supplier integration. Eventually, a higher degree of supplier integration is proposed to positively influence supply chain performance. By building on prior research and 30 case studies, the framework provides a China-specific approach to supplier integration and offers insights into the current status in the Chinese automotive industry.

Supplier integration has become an important concept for improving supply chain performance. The aim of this paper is to identify factors that facilitate and inhibit supplier integration in the context of the Chinese automotive industry. An inductive approach based on grounded theory was chosen as the research methodology, where data was collected through 30 detailed case interviews with subsidiaries of foreign automotive companies operating in China. The results indicate that buyer‐side leadership is an important antecedent for building motivation, trust, and commitment among suppliers and for shaping their mindsets. This, in turn, facilitates strategic alignment and enables suppliers to build collaborative capabilities, which are finally shown to be a key enabler for successful supplier integration.