Peter Ekman

Extending the ERP system: considering the business relationship portfolio

Purpose – Research has shown that companies focus their internal processes when they adopt enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. However, the ERP systems need to expand their functionality to ...

Information technology utilization for industrial marketing activities: the IT–marketing gap

Purpose – This study aims to investigates the possible gap between the logic of these information technology (IT) systems and industrial firms’ marketing practices. Industrial firms rely extensively on IT systems for their business. Design/methodology/approach – Based on the contemporary marketing practice (CMP) model, which depicts firms’ marketing practice as ranging from transactional to more relational and networked-based, the logic of IT systems and how users in industrial firms adopt them are amended to create an extended model. The extended model is used to analyze an in-depth case based on 63 interviews regarding one industrial firm’s business with customers and suppliers and how IT is utilized in this setting. Findings – Results show that industrial firms’ relationship-oriented business is poorly supported by currently used IT systems. This gap between the IT systems, which are transaction-focused, and industrial firms’ marketing practice, which is relationship-based, has severe effects on adopti...

A model to support IT infrastructure planning and the allocation of IT governance authority

Information technology (IT) requires a significant investment, involving up to 10.5% of revenue for some firms. Managers responsible for aligning IT investments with their firms strategy seek to minimize technology costs, while ensuring that the IT infrastructure can accommodate increasing utilization, new software applications, and modifications to existing software applications. It becomes more challenging to align IT infrastructure and IT investments with firm strategy when firms operate in multiple geographic markets, because the firm faces different competitive positions and unique challenges in each market. We discussed these challenges with IT executives at four Forbes Global 2000 firms headquartered in Northern Europe. We build on interviews with these executives to develop a discrete-time, finite-horizon Markov decision model to identify the most economically-beneficial IT infrastructure configuration from a set of alternatives. While more flexibility is always better (all else equal) and lower cost is always better (all else equal), our model helps firms evaluate the tradeoff between flexibility and cost given their business strategy and corporate structure. Our model supports firms in the decision process by incorporating their data and allowing firms to include their expectations of how future business conditions may impact the need to make IT changes. Because the model is flexible enough to accept parameters across a range of business strategies and corporate structures, the model can help inform decisions and ensure that design choices are consistent with firm strategy.

The enterprise system revisited: how well does it capture the company’s business network?

Purpose – This paper aims to analyse how well enterprise systems capture the business network in which an industrial company is involved. Enterprise systems have been presented as a “dream come true” with a seamless integration of business data through a common database and software modules that can be customized to the companies’ different functions. However, research shows that companies’ utilization of enterprise systems is limited, and that internal processes are prioritized. Design/methodology/approach – European multinational companies and some of their partners have been followed through case studies between 2003 and 2010. The pattern-matching analysis has been supported by a theoretical framework that depicts industrial companies as engaged in business relationships in a network setting. Findings – The results show that the company’s relationship-oriented activities are badly captured by the enterprise system. The study highlights limitations that future enterprise systems need to address if they ...

Internal MNC structures’ bearing on externally embedded subsidiaries’ organizational performance

The theoretical research stream that depicts multinational companies (MNCs) as networked organizations has offered new insights on contemporary enterprises’ way of functioning. However, the majority of the research has focused on external embeddedness, that is, MNC subsidiaries’ local business relationships, and its impact on subsidiary organizational performance. This conceptual chapter addresses the lack of research focusing on internal embeddedness, that is, subsidiary relationships with headquarters and sister subsidiaries. Internal embeddedness is discussed from two dimensions: the internal production network and the MNC manager’s social network. The characteristics of each dimension and how they relate to earlier research, leads to a number of theoretical propositions. The chapter concludes with a discussion on how external and internal embeddedness relate, as well as how they may impact the subsidiary’s (organizational) performance.

Understanding enterprise systems' impact(s) on business relationships

Enterprise systems (ESs), i.e. standardized applications supplied from software vendors such as SAP or Oracle, have been extensively employed by companies during the last decade. Today all Fortune 500 companies have, or are in the process of installing, this kind of information system. A wide-spread denotation for these applications is enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. But the broad utilization use of these software packages in business is rendering this labelling too narrow (Davenport 2000).A central aspect of ESs is their multi-dimensional characteristics. Based upon a (virtual) common database, ESs allow all business activities to be observed throughout the company (i.e. an operation performed by marketing may be displayed in finance; purchasing; supply functions, and so forth, in real-time). But with this high visibility and extensive information processing capacity comes the drawback that the information system as a whole may be hard to grasp (Markus 2004, Davenport 1998).When implementing an ES package, the company can select from different industry-adapted modules providing core functionalities (i.e. that support proc¬es¬ses such as production, supply chain management, and R&D), as well among complementary modules to be used in support processes (such as finance, HR, marketing, etc). In fact, along with Internet, ESs can be seen as the most important technology to have attained wide-spread use during the last decade (Seddon et al. 2003). For a company this means that the integration of an ES into its business operations by neces-sity will, to a greater or lesser extent, affect the business activities that are carried out. For companies, these business activities have been observed by researchers to take place within relatively stable, long-term oriented business relationships with specific well-known counterparts (Hakansson and Snehota 1995). This means that ESs, especially with the high level of usage in companies (Seddon et al. 2003), become an interesting research object not only from a company-focused perspective, but also from a broader perspective, allowing business relationships to unique suppliers and customers to be included.But how can ESs be captured and understood in this setting? This question will be discussed and elaborated on in the following sections, leading to some recommendations on relevant issues

How Multinational Corporations Use Information Technology to Manage Global Operations

ABSTRACT Despite a generally acknowledged importance of information technology (IT) in enabling global strategy and a broad understanding of the manner in which IT enhances coordination and reduces cost, few studies have focused precisely on how multinational corporations (MNCs) use IT to facilitate globalization. To address this gap in the literature, we conduct a case study across four large MNCs, and use primary data to develop predictive propositions on the characteristics of products, processes, and customers that impact the ways in which MNCs use IT to manage their global operations.

Bringing Practitioner into the Classroom: Student Reflections and Learning Types: An Abstract

We witness a growing interest in the marketing area regarding the relationship between marketing theory and marketing practice, the usefulness of marketing models, or how firms carry out their marketing practice. The business discipline has since long taken an interest in the practical use of theories, i.e., as stated by Kurt Levin (1951): “There is nothing as practical as a good theory.” However, the theory-practice linkage has to a limited degree been transferred into the classroom, and only a few studies have so far focused on the effects of bringing practice into the classroom. There are some notable examples of nursing and medicine studies and disciplines that are known for applying reflective practice. However, there is a lack of this research within management and marketing literature. A common way of achieving practice-related assignments is to bring the students into the field, but what happens when you bring the field to the classroom? This can, for example, be done by introducing practice into the classroom by involving practitioners – i.e., executives, managers, consultants, and so forth – in student assignments. Well managed, this means that (a) the student gets to engage in a real-world-like setting and (b) that the student can reflect upon both his or her action and all the nuances of the (practical) event. In this study, we aim to contribute to our understanding regarding the effect of bringing marketing practitioners into the class-learning situation by (i) investigating how such learning experiences affect the students learning and (ii) what kind of learning the practitioner-based activity gives. Our goal is to shed some light on what kind of learning process “practice” in the classroom leads to and what kind of obstacles and benefits there are. We do this by carrying out an explorative study following grounded theory. Our research is inspired by grounded theory and it complements current marketing and management pedagogy studies. While working with cases allows the teacher to design a learning opportunity with clear intended learning outcome (ILO), or using simulation tools, these are artificial situations that do not reflect all the nuances of a “real-life” business situations. Internships do offer the student these nuances, but they are hard to connect to specific ILOs. We focus on a learning methodology that integrates the best of these two practice-oriented methods – i.e., having clear ILOs and bringing business atmosphere into the classroom. The study span 60 individual written student reflections and the results indicate different aspects of the students’ learning process. We coded the students’ renderings and categorized the findings into second-order constructs. Thereafter, the results were compiled, through axial coding, into a conceptual model that should be used for further development and exploration. The model indicates that learning is not only related to the student’s qualities and form of learning triggers; it is also moderated by the student’s emotions and how well the assignment is carried out and understood. The study is a novel attempt to increase our knowledge of how this type of assignments affects the students as well as lead to the fulfillment of ILOs.

Customer Value Through Resource Integration: The Role of the Institutional Solution Space: An Abstract

In this paper, we elaborate service-dominant (S-D) logic’s concept of resource integration as a premise for customer value co-creation and service provision. Following S-D logic, resource integration that results in customer value is dependent on institutions and institutional arrangements. S-D logic’s fifth axiom states: “Value co-creation is coordinated through actor-generated institutions and institutional arrangements” (Vargo & Lusch, 2016, page 18). We report on three case study findings to offer contextualized explanations that seek to join current conceptualizations with solid explanatory power. These cases span from the digitalization of music industry, sustainable strategies in the real estate industry, and insights from an innovation lab for open innovations. The empirical renderings are utilized to help to explain the institutional arrangements that are at play. The results show that the potential boundaries of, how, and which resources can be utilized and integrated are to great extent related to the perceived available “solution space” (von Hippel, 2001) or “opportunity space” (Normann, 2001) offered by the institutional and practice-related boundaries of the context (Ridell, Rondell, & Sorhammar, 2012). By integrating the ideas of a solution space and opportunity space with the later rendering of institutional arrangements as denominator for value creation, we contribute to the current mid-range theory development of S-D logic as well as a better understanding of value co-creation in practice. The introduced concept of institutional solution space combines the idiosyncratic needs of actors with the perceived – i.e., institutional and socio-material-derived – opportunities associated with resources. Thus, it offers a bridge between the abstract concepts of resource integration, value-in-context, and institutional arrangements (Vargo & Lusch, 2016).

Technology-Based Self-Service (TBSS) Innovations in B2B Settings: An Abstract

Contemporary services innovations regularly come embedded in both information technology (IT) and organizational arrangements. (Ostrom et al., 2015, page 127) capture this current trend: “The context in which service is delivered and experienced has, in many respects, fundamentally changed. Advances in technology, especially information technology, are leading to a proliferation of revolutionary services and changing how customers serve themselves before, during, and after purchase.” Research that especially focuses on the integration of technology in the service system has been labeled self-service technology (SST) and technology-based self-service (TBSS). Breidback et al. (2012) did further add that most services will be a mix of technology and human-based interaction, what they label “technology-enabled value co-creation.” Following this research stream, less high-tech and service-oriented companies will meet challenges when introducing innovative services given that these services both require technical know-how and a market-oriented mindset. By acknowledging the socio-technical and social-material aspects of current service innovation, it is possible to unbundle activities from the physical restraints and open up innovation opportunities, facilitating a more customized rebundling of the service innovation to facilitate enhanced customer value. The vast majority of TBSS studies have focused on consumer markets which partly can be explained by the fact that business-to-business (B2B) companies have been late adopters. The main reason can be that B2B markets to a higher degree are few-to-few rather than many-to-many markets, the substantial cost of partner specific investments, as well as the overall complex linkages and process in B2B relationships. While prior studies have seen TBSS as an addition in firms’ value proposition portfolio, this study puts an emphasis on considering the TBSS as an innovation in a conservative B2B market context. It adopts a service-dominant (S-D) logic perspective on innovation and puts forth the research questions: (a) What capabilities do firms need when developing TBSS innovations and (b) what sort of institutional work they engage in. The study is carried out as an explorative and longitudinal field study of Humlegarden Fastigheter AB (a real estate firm that only have commercial tenants and that introduced a TBSS in 2012) and its suppliers and customers. Humlegarden Fastigheter AB is a “Prime Mover” as they developed a TBSS in the real estate and facility industry where new services are rare. The results show how such firms will need to acquire and develop several capacities when striving for new value propositions. The study offers an emergent theory on how a TBSS innovation engages actors in the service ecosystem and pinpoints the forms of institutional work a focal actor needs to carry out to change the service ecosystem’s actors’ cognitive framework, current norms, as well as comply with regulations.