Strategic supplier selection using multi-stakeholder and multi-perspective approaches

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Introduction

Supply management is one of the key issues of manufacturing supply chain management because the costs of raw materials and component parts constitute the main cost of a product, and most firms spend considerable amounts of their sales revenues on purchasing. Goffin et al. (2006) suggest that supplier selection is one of the most important decision making problems in supply management. Ghodsypour and O’Brien (2001) find that selecting the right supplier significantly reduces the purchasing costs and improves corporate competitiveness. Therefore, appropriate supplier selection improves supply chain performance.

Strategic supplier selection is different from the conventional low-cost and one-off supplier selection. Increasingly organizations are pursuing long-term relationships with their suppliers for strategic and crucial items with a view to soliciting insights for new product development and resolving various operational issues. The selection of appropriate suppliers involves consideration of multiple quantitative and qualitative criteria other than price (Ho et al., 2010). Strategic supplier selection should involve multiple internal stakeholders (e.g., quality, manufacturing, finance, marketing etc.) and external stakeholders (e.g., national/local government, policy makers, environmental groups, community/public etc.) rather than the purchasing and supply management function in isolation. The active involvement of concerned stakeholders would lead to a balanced consideration of multiple and conflicting voices of customers and provide a mechanism to communicate tacit knowledge – knowledge that is known by one individual or department that may not otherwise be communicated through the organization. Therefore, the multi-stakeholder and multi-perspective approaches help supply management personnel understand the essential requirements from various departments and make the sourcing decisions more effective (Ho et al., 2011).

Selecting strategic suppliers without taking a holistic perspective of all the stakeholders concerned would have a negative impact on supply chain performance. For example, the common practice of the bioenergy sector is to make decisions on biomass supplier selection solely by technical experts, who focus on finding the optimal solution in a cost-efficient manner, but neglect holistic planning and stakeholder support. The opinions and perspectives of the concerned stakeholders across the bioenergy supply chain are rarely considered or they are only considered after the suppliers have been selected, and the result is often the failure of a project (Scott et al., 2013).

Various approaches that can deal with multiple and conflicting criteria in decision making have been proposed and applied extensively in the academic literature (Weber et al., 1991, Degraeve et al., 2000, De Boer et al., 2001, Ho et al., 2010, Chai et al., 2013). However, few of them consider the impact of company strategies and the perspectives of company stakeholders in relation to the identification of suitable criteria for strategic supplier selection. Hence, the selected suppliers would not be able to meet long-term business objectives. In addition, most of such approaches are theoretical in nature and have not been empirically validated.

This special issue of the International Journal of Production Economics aims to provide a platform for sharing novel and potential multi-stakeholder and multi-perspective approaches for strategic supplier selection. Among 64 submissions, we accepted 10 papers presenting new and significant research in this area, and they are classified into analytical and empirical approaches.

Section snippets

Analytical approaches

The paper, “Developing green purchasing relationships for the manufacturing industry: An evolutionary game theory perspective” by Ji et al. (2015), updates the supplier selection concept model suggested by de Boer and develops an evolutionary game model to observe the cooperation tendency of multi-stakeholders (suppliers and manufacturers) and establish long-term green purchasing relationships between them. The model was tested in a Hong Kong based toy manufacturing company. Their findings,

Empirical approaches

The paper, “Strategic sourcing supplier selection misalignment with critical success factors: Findings from multiple case studies in Germany and the United Kingdom” by Kotula et al. (2015), conducts 20 case studies to qualitatively evaluate and understand the current role of strategic sourcing, the critical success factors for business performance and its relationship with strategic sourcing, and strategic supplier evaluation criteria from multiple stakeholders׳ perspectives specific to

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