Ulrich Berbner

Supply Chain Collaboration or Conflict? Information Sharing and Supply Chain Performance in the Automotive Industry

Information sharing in supply chains has taken a centre stage in the discourse of business and research in the last few decades, because information is not only the linchpin for companies for leaping ahead, but also the key to survival. It is thus imperative for practitioners to get inside the “black box” of the decision-making context in which supply chain information is either shared or retained and to exploit the intricate relationship between information sharing/retaining and supply chain performance. In this study, the influential antecedents of the decision-making process including goals, inter-organizational conflicts, power, and trust are investigated on the supply chain level. Employing a comparative case study in the automotive industry, a set of theoretical propositions could be derived by focusing on causal-process observations. Our study contributes to the process of theory construction and has several important implications for practitioners. Since goal conflicts are often not well understood in practice and their impact on supply chain performance is frequently realized with delay, practitioners need to know about the roles of goals, inter-organizational conflict of goals, power, and trust in order to facilitate supply chain-wide information sharing and improve supply chain performance.

The Interdisciplinary Decision Map - A Reference Model for Production, Logistics and Traffic

Due to strong interdependencies between production, logistics and traffic, a decision in one of these fields has impacts on the others. However, decision-makers in and around today’s supply chains rarely consider effects of their decisions on other participants of the supply chain or the traffic system. Thus, a tool for decision support, which clearly illustrates the variety of impacts of a decision, is highly desirable. Accordingly, this chapter presents a reference model in the context of production, logistics and traffic, called Interdisciplinary Decision Map (IDM). The IDM allows for describing and analysing interdisciplinary impacts of decisions across the disciplines. Thus, it can serve as decision support tool for decision-makers out of the considered domains. The IDM’s applicability is demonstrated by using it to analyse selected impacts of an HGV toll’s introduction on production, logistics and traffic.