The Hazards of Sole Sourcing Relationships: Challenges, Practices, and Insights

摘要

Fueled by advances in information technology, supply chain management has moved from a back office administrative function to a board room imperative. Today, companies work more closely with their suppliers to be more responsive to customers' changing needs and to build competitiveness. Many firms have significantly reduced the number of suppliers they use, sometimes to a single, trusted source to enable tight integration between firms. Operations management scholars continue to examine the effects of tight supplier integration and often point to the positive relationship between integration and performance (Handheld, Ragatz, Peterson, and Monczka, 1999; Kulp, Lee, and Ofek, 2004; Rosenzweig, Roth, and Dean Jr, 2003). With a relationship built on a foundation of trust, single supplier relationships potentially offer many benefits. The buyer and a single supplier can better coordinate shipments and production, share technological knowledge to integrate the input into production, and communicate design changes to mutual benefit. Multiple sourcing, in contrast, may weaken the ties between the firm and its suppliers making communication, control, and standardization more difficult.