Essays on Purchasing and Supply Management

The influence and complexity of Purchasing and Supply Management has increased dramatically over the last decades. Today, Purchasing and Supply Management operates across functional fiefdoms and across corporate boundaries in order to ensure efficiency along the entire value chain. The evolution of purchasing from a simple negotiation task to a boardroom matter and the transformation of an ordinary trucking company into a multifaceted logistics service provider has altered entire business models and has perturbed the competitive landscape. A vast amount of research has been carried out to provide efficient supply chain solutions. However, even more research still needs to be done within the highly relevant research stream of Purchasing and Supply Management.
The Chair of Supply Chain Management at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität of Erlangen-Nürnberg focuses on performing excellent research in the three most influential future themes of Purchasing and Supply Management, namely talent management, supply chain collaboration and service science. This dissertation addresses the first two themes with four theory-based and empirical articles. First, the dramatically changed responsibilities and tasks of Purchasing and Supply Management require a complete different set of competencies on various hierarchy levels. The job description of a regular purchasing officer today is not comparable to a purchasing officer's tasks few years ago. Similarly, more and more often, executive boards include chief purchasing officers - a position that did not even exist in most companies in the last decade. IT infrastructure, corporate guidelines, scarce resources and global interrelations have increased complexity and research needs to provide competence frameworks, management tools and training to ensure skilled personnel and world-class processes in Purchasing and Supply Management. This dissertation addresses this emerging field in the first article by applying stakeholder theory to develop a hierarchy-specific competence framework which guides managers on how to best address the key stakeholders of the modern purchasing function. Second, the idea of supply chain collaboration dates back into the last century when concepts like just-in-time and continuous replenishment were first introduced. Most companies, however, collaborate only on a dyadic level and even there, perfect collaboration is rare. Our research shows that implementation of supply chain management concepts still lacks behind. The glaring inefficiencies all over the supply chain demonstrate immediate need for researchers to translate research findings into management behavior. The articles two to four contribute on the theme of supply chain collaboration in various ways. The second article addresses integrated supply chain risk management and its effect on risk performance. The third article shows a benchmarking framework for supply network configuration which enables supply managers to assess their supply network and compare with others. The fourth article applies case study research to analyze the status quo of supply chain costing and collaboration in a world-class automotive supply chain. Third, the recent past has shown that the future revenue driver of companies in the Western world will be services. A company's innovative ability to invent, develop and carry out new services is a key competitive advantage. The Chair of Supply Chain Management at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg will continue to deliver result-driven research from idea generation to market readiness of innovative supply chain services.
I would like to congratulate Mr. Kern on this exceptionally well-executed research and I wish him well for his personal future.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Evi Hartmann