An Information Management Perspective of Supplier Selection Process in Manufacturing Networks
The past decades have been characterized by an increasing interest of companies in international trade and significant foreign direct investments, which led to a shift from localized manufacturing companies to global manufacturing networks. The main goal
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Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal [email protected] 2 INESC TEC, Porto, Portugal
Abstract. The past decades have been characterized by an increasing interest of companies in international trade and significant foreign direct investments, which led to a shift from localized manufacturing companies to global manufacturing networks. The main goal of this research is to analyze the management of infor‐ mation within the process of supplier selection in the context of manufacturing networks. The adoption of field study methodology allows understanding how the supplier selection process is carried out in Multinational Companies (MNCs) in different manufacturing sectors. In particular, this paper aims at identifying the information that mother company and their subsidiary companies share during the supplier selection process, and how they access to this information. Keywords: Manufacturing networks · Supplier selection process · Information management
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Introduction
Market globalization allows to broaden the potential base of customers worldwide but at the same time it leads to challenges in the management of suppliers and logistics. Moreover, the need for a quick reaction to the changes in demand, the decreasing production costs and the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) solutions leads to increasing level of uncertainty that organizations have to face [1–3]. Consequently, companies nowadays require increased efforts to manage their manu‐ facturing plants from various locations and with different local requirements in order to maintain the service levels required by their customers [4, 5]. This paper aims at contri‐ buting with new research at the intersection of information management and manufac‐ turing networks fields of research. Manufacturing networks (MNs) are networks of production plants that are wholly owned by a mother company, i.e. all factories are under full financial control of the Multinational Company (MNC) [6]. The main goal of this research is to analyze the management of information within the process of supplier selection in multinational companies. Particular attention is given to the information acquisition phase and usage of external information in the whole process. The activities considered in the supplier selection process in this study are namely: problem formulation, formulation of criteria, supplier qualification, and final © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved H. Afsarmanesh et al. (Eds.): PRO-VE 2016, IFIP AICT 480, pp. 178–188, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-45390-3_16
An Information Management Perspective of Supplier Selection Process
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selection [7]. For what concern the information management it is considered to being composed by the following processes: information acquisition, organization, distribu‐ tion and usage [8]. Specifically, this paper addresses the following research question: How is informa‐ tion managed in t
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