Grażyna Wieteska

Building resilient relationships with suppliers in the B2B market

Summary The growing uncertainty of business environment that negatively influences the contemporary supply chains is one of the major challenges for today’s managers. The literature recommends the development of resistant supply chains, defining them as adaptive and flexible. However, there are a few scientific publications that directly link to the area of Supplier Relationship Management in this regard. The article aims to answer the question what is the flexibility and adaptability and how to perceive these two characteristics in terms of an upstream supply chain. The observations indicate that building relationships resistant to these disruptions with suppliers includes the formulation of appropriate strategies towards both the suppliers and the purchasing process. Their choice depends on the source of uncertainty and the costs of switching the suppliers

Supplier risk in building B2B relationships – portfolio models approach

Nowadays, more and more companies notice that the cooperation with suppliers can be a way of gaining the competitive advantage. On the other hand, suppliers are the source of serious disruptions for the supply chains. The main aim of this paper is to analyse the supplier operational and strategic risk in terms of the portfolio B2B models, what can be a starting point for a comprehensive supplier risk reduction. Using empirical results from 165 respondents the barriers to effective supplier risk management were examined. This issue has not been studied and presented in the literature earlier. Collected survey data show that one of the main problems is lack of involvement of suppliers in developing the cooperation. Knowledge of the barriers allows managers to intensify improvement activities in the weakest areas of the relationship. It is also important to identify effective tools for overcoming identified barriers and take into account different sectors. This can be pursued in the future research.

Supply Chain Risk

In recent years, the question of how to ensure process continuity in relationships between supplier and customer has been getting more attention in academic discussion and commercial practice. This is due to a significant increase in levels of risk, in particular in international supply chains. The main reasons for this increase are the following: • globalisation, outsourcing and offshoring strategies, which translate into increasingly complex supply chains due to the diversification of links involved in the process of the flow of information and goods and, consequently, heightened uncertainty in relationships between supplier and purchaser; reduction of the supplier base, single sourcing and global sourcing; concentration of manufacturing sites and suppliers in a single location, central distribution; focus on efficiency rather than effectiveness and flexibility (Juttner, Peck and Christopher 2003, pp. 197–210); new threats, including terrorism (the attack on the World Trade Center triggered increased attention to the issue of international security); climate change (Australian Greenhouse Office 2006, p. 16) (the number of natural disasters has doubled over the last 20 years (The Center for Research on Environmental Decisions 2008, p. 10));

Sharing Economy in Logistics and Supply Chain Management

Background: Challenges in today’s business environment require from logistics and supply chains managers continuous searching for innovative methods in business processes management, oriented to the simultaneous achievement of the Triple Bottom Line effects, namely economic, social and environmental. As a result, the concept of sharing economy is nowadays gaining rising significance among business practices. It has positive impact on building and development of collaborative relations between business partners in value chains as well as between potential market competitors. Sharing economy in logistics and supply chain management determines the requirement to manage companies’ potential and relations between them in a different way. Materials and results: The paper is based on a desk research. The authors conducted a review of recent literature, reports of international institutions and consulting firms, conference presentations, materials provided by companies, professional business movies and other Internet sources. As a result of the materials analysis, different best practices in sharing were described and success factors for their development in logistics and supply chain management were indicated. Conclusions: The development of sharing practices is one of the most important aims of the managers responsible for business processes management in supply chains, especially for logistics processes. The presented sharing practices highlight different implementation possibilities and their significant influence on business activities in various aspects. Despite the variety, sharing practices have common characteristics, which could be indicated as their operational and strategic success factors. They enable the authors to present practical recommendations addressed to logistics and supply

Supply Chain Risk Management

Supply chain risk management (SCRM) is based on the same methodology as enterprise risk management (ERM). It presents risk management as a process composed of a number of stages (AIRMIC/ALARM/ IRM: 2002; COSO 2004; HM Treasury 2004; ISO 31000:2009; Fraser and Simkins 2010, p. 103): 1. threat identification (related to objectives, values); 2. risk measurement (probability and consequences of an event); 3. risk evaluation (identification of its acceptability); 4. risk treatment (making a decision on how to influence the risk); 5. risk monitoring and control.