Perception and practice of the supplier relationship management

Abstract

The aim of our paper is to investigate the perception of the supplier relationships and the tools used in their management in Hungary, examining as well as the unison of the declared and followed values concerning these relationships. The premise of our study is that firms work in networks of business relationships. The performance of the firm is therefore affected not only by its inner processes and performance, but also by the performance of its business partners (suppliers, as well as customers) and by the management of their business relationships. The relationship between a company’s performance and its relations is a common belief in the business relationship literature (Ford et al. 1998, Håkansson 1982, Håkansson–Snehota 1995). Relationship management capability is considered to be one of the companies’ core success factors. In our previous researches we have investigated the effect of business relationship management on the performance of the firm, and value creating role of business relationships (Wimmer–Mandják 2002, Wimmer et al. 2004). In this study we focus on the managers’ views on supplier-buyer relationships, and investigate their perception and the management tools used in their practice. The empirical research is built on the results of the competitiveness survey conducted by the Competitiveness Research Center at Corvinus University of Budapest in 2009. Four managers of three hundred Hungarian companies filled a comprehensive questionnaire about their special field: top management, marketing or sales management, operations management and finance. The survey and therefore our paper is wholly built on the managers' subjective perception. It is a somehow philosophical claim, that this perception is crucial, because the whole range of individual and group decisions are not based on knowledge about an abstract “real” world, but on how the world is seen by the decision makers. In the empirical analyses we focus our attention on the perception of business relationships (the characteristics of the valuable supplier-buyer relationships) and the expectations towards suppliers and buyers. From practice we examine the support function of certain information and controlling elements, analysing also the different experiences of functional managers. We tried to find the connections between these perceptions of relationships and the practical support of managing these relationships. Potential future research directions and conclusions close the article.