Alfonso Durán Heras

Explaining Alliance Success Factors in Spanish Food and Beverage Supply Chain: Case Analysis

Over the last decades, partnerships have captured great interest of both academics and practitioners, being a form of business management that could help companies to achieve their strategic goals beyond the level they can reach acting as isolated entities. But even though authors have been working for many years on the applicability of the different theories that could explain alliance success, still nowadays some questions about why the alliance success rate is much lower than failures rate arise. In this study, developed from an in-depth analysis of cases in successful partnerships experiences within Spanish Food and Beverage industry, authors have tried to identify relevant factors that could provide additional explanations to those causes that can generate a remarkable higher success rate in certain companies. The aim would be to explore if these factors could provide clues to understand what drives alliance success that have not been sufficiently studied yet.

QUÉ PODEMOS APRENDER DE LAS EMPRESAS QUE TIENEN ÉXITO EN ALIANZAS

ABSTRACT:nFor decades, alliances have been a strategic tool widely used by organizations to improve their competitiveness and achieve their corporate objectives. They have been used to reach targets as diverse as entering new market segments, developing new products, internationalization, improving customer service, ... nnDespite being frequently utilized, and in spite of the development and widespread recommendation of some best practices for alliance´s management, many studies show that more than half of all alliances fail. nnThis document aims to identify the alliance practices that have been developed by certain companies, which allow them to achieve success rates far above those identified in the abovementioned studies. These companies have developed a specific advanced alliance management, that gives them a competitive advantage. In this study the cases of four large companies - with excellent success rate in multiple partnerships - have been analyzed, to identify what kind of specific alliance competences have been developed by them and to propose recommendations potentially applicable in other companies to improve their future success rate.nnKey words: alliances, alliance success, alliance capabilities, alliance phases, alliances in large companies

Business Process Modelling as a synchronisation tool: improving client-provider communication in a context of service outsourcing

This paper shows how Business Process Modelling (BPM) can be used as a powerful tool for improving provider client communication in a context of service outsourcing. The objective of this approach is to reduce some of the inefficiencies and disturbances that occur in situations of organisational decoupling (outsourcing), geographical decoupling (offshoring) or both (offshore outsourcing). The findings discussed in this paper are especially relevant to situations of offshore outsourcing in which communications problems are augmented by cultural differences and geographical distance. The experience reported is part of a six months action-research project that was carried out by the University Carlos III of Madrids Engineering Management Group in one of the leading callcentre companies in Spain.

Características de las empresas que utilizan arquitectura orientada para servicios y de su contexto de operación

The aim of this article is to establish the main characteristics of the organizations that have successfully implemented information systems based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Their environmental circumstances have also been studied. To achieve this objective, a SOA bibliographic review has been carried out, encompassing an analysis of 25 real cases in which different SOA applications were successfully implemented. All these cases were published between 2.001 and 2.007. The conclusions of this article can be briefly summarized as follows: SOA is well suited for organizations that rely on important legacy systems, whose performance is hindered by the lack of integration and flexibility of their computer architectures. These organizations therefore need to improve such architectures rather than replace them by new systems; SOA is being used by organizations that need to integrate their systems with those of their supply chain partners; SOA solutions provide support for the use of Web technologies.

Work in Progress - A Collaborative ERP Configuration Project: Preparing Engineering Students for the Global Economy

Calls from the industry to reform engineering education have been consistent through the past decades. The clear message is that graduates not only need to possess sound technical knowledge in their chosen disciplines but also need to be better educated in the areas of communication skills, teamwork, leadership and other professional skills. Despite of the recognized importance, it is not easy to develop and implement a curriculum that fosters such skills. Also, subsequent outcome assessment of the achieved skill levels poses many challenges and demands much creativity. This paper describes a joint experience between Syracuse University in USA and Carlos III University in Spain. The context is the education of engineering students in fundamental business processes and integration using an industry-scale enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Groups of multinational engineering students from the two schools carried out a project of developing an executable ERP system using various distributed collaboration tools. Findings from this experience are discussed and other on-going efforts are described in this paper