Analysis of supplier buyer relationships using resource constrained project scheduling strategies

Many studies in the product development literature discuss the benefits of partnering with suppliers. In these partnership relations buyers and suppliers establish long term, co-operative relationships during Product Development Projects (PDP) in order to reduce product development time and improve project performance. Traditional contractual approaches, on the other hand, where buyers work independently of suppliers and lack control over suppliers' resources, are commonly blamed for delays in the development time. This study constitutes of an initial effort to model and investigate these relationships analytically. The impact of scheduling strategies, the number of suppliers, and resource availability on PDP completion time is evaluated under contractual or partnership arrangement. Contractual relationships seem to provide a good or even better development times than the ones provided by the partnership approach

Interorganisatorische Entwicklungspartnerschaften zwischen Automobilherstellern und Lieferanten: Kausalbeziehungen des Pie Sharing, Pie Expansion und Opportunismus - Eine empirische Analyse zu den Auswirkungen partnerschaftlicher Ertragsaufteilung

Firms pursue buyer-supplier new product development (NPD) partnerships to achieve competitive advantages by combining interorganizational resources. Although such collaborations have been confirmed to expand the partnership’s total value pie, managerial practice shows that sharing the pie increasingly results in win-lose rivalry amongst partners, resulting in zero-sum pie sharing competition and affecting the partnership’s competitiveness. This dissertation examines the causal effects of pie sharing, pie expansion and opportunism in interorganizational NPD partnerships. To reach our conclusion, we investigated sources of pie expansion from a resource-based view (RBV) and analyzed how it is mediated by fairness in pie sharing. As NPD partnerships induce dependencies between buyers and suppliers, we extend the RBV with mediated effects of resource dependence theory (RDT). Bilateral opportunism between partners is addressed using social exchange theory (SET). To complement the economic decision-making process in partnerships with social factors, this study examines influential factors and NPD’s consequences of fairness in pie sharing, in order to explore fairness from both sides. Using three structural equation models, we tested our hypotheses on pie sharing, pie expansion and opportunism in interorganizational collaborations with empirical data of 147 buyer-supplier NPD partnerships between suppliers and automotive manufacturers. The first model’s key finding indicates that fairness in pie sharing significantly mediates pie expansion. Furthermore, buyer-supplier NPD partnerships enable suppliers to increase buyers’ dependency on their firm, which mediates suppliers’ competitive advantage, resulting in fairer pie sharing. The second model’s key finding indicates that opportunistic firms can immediately improve their individual financial performance, but only until there are counter opportunistic reactions by the disadvantaged partner. When both partners’ level of opportunism is at parity, firms cannot generate any individual performance increases by being opportunistic. The third model’s key finding indicates that pie sharing fairness significantly influences the partnership’s ability to improve their NPD performance in form of product-innovation, product-quality and production-cost-optimization. Moreover, unfairness in sharing the pie showed to increase harmful opportunism, which negatively mediates the relationship between pie sharing fairness and NPD performance. To control pie sharing fairness, our analysis revealed three influential factors which significantly affect partners’ perception of fairness