دانلود مقاله ISI انگلیسی شماره 326
ترجمه فارسی عنوان مقاله

غلبه بر موانع اصلی در آغاز و با استفاده از خرید کارت امتیازی متوازن

عنوان انگلیسی
Overcoming the main barriers in initiating and using purchasing-BSCs
کد مقاله سال انتشار تعداد صفحات مقاله انگلیسی
326 2004 13 صفحه PDF
منبع

Publisher : Elsevier - Science Direct (الزویر - ساینس دایرکت)

Journal : Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management, Volume 10, Issue 6, November 2004, Pages 269–281

ترجمه کلمات کلیدی
() کارت امتیازی متوازن - خرید - مدیریت استراتژی - ارزیابی عملکرد - تحقیق مطالعه موردی - کارت امتیازی متوازن - سیستم ارزیابی عملکرد
کلمات کلیدی انگلیسی
پیش نمایش مقاله
پیش نمایش مقاله  غلبه بر موانع اصلی در آغاز و با استفاده از خرید کارت امتیازی متوازن

چکیده انگلیسی

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC), as a strategic management and control tool with an integrated set of leading and lagging performance measures, can secure successful implementation of purchasing strategies. However, the quality of the BSC itself as well as the effectiveness of the process to set up, implement, and use the BSC are crucial. Recognizing the growing importance of the purchasing-BSC (P-BSC) combined with the problems companies are facing, the authors emphasize the necessity for a better management process for purchasing strategies, introduce the P-BSC concept as a means to improve implementation success, and study the main barriers companies are facing when they initiate and use P-BSCs. This study and the recommendations how to overcome these barriers are based on seven in-depth case studies which derived from an action research project with European multinational firms.

مقدمه انگلیسی

Increasing environmental complexity, global competition, technological advances, and increased demands by upper management and shareholders has led organizations to focus on new sourcing practices and more complex approaches to purchasing. For example, the focus shifted from “make” to “buy” (e.g., Leiblein et al., 2002), from short-term-oriented deal making with suppliers to differentiated supplier management (e.g., Wagner and Boutellier, 2002), or from price focus to total cost of ownership (e.g., Ferrin and Plank, 2002). These changes are coupled with the evolution of purchasing to a strategic activity. Once considered primarily an administrative function, purchasing is today viewed as an important contributor to a firm's competitive position (e.g., Rajagopal and Bernhard, 1993; Carr and Pearson, 1999; Wagner and Johnson, 2004). Purchasing activities should also be taken into consideration as part of business and corporate strategy (e.g., Freeman and Cavinato, 1990; Watts et al., 1992; Narasimhan and Carter, 1998) and the responsible managers should design strategies to give purchasing activities and structures a proper strategic direction (e.g., Carr and Smeltzer, 1997; Eßig and Wagner, 2003). As it is likely that many firms in the years to come need to gain a sustainable source of competitive advantage from their purchasing practices (Carter et al., 2000), the importance of strategies in purchasing will further increase. Knowing about the importance of strategies in purchasing is not sufficient. The capabilities of purchasing to successfully implement them will influence how and where contributions to a firm's competitiveness are made. The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) has often been recommended as a management concept (or a management tool) linking strategies and short-term actions, i.e. to speed up and to simplify the process of strategy implementation (e.g., Kaplan and Norton, 1996b; Horváth and Kaufmann, 1998). A review of the pertinent literature—published in academic as well as in professional journals—revealed that there is a substantial body of knowledge on the initiation, set-up, roll-out, and ongoing use of BSCs. The literature mostly circles around the use of BSCs for the implementation of “classical” corporate or business unit strategies and investigates BSC applications in various industries. Although, Kaplan and Norton (2000) explicitly recommend that the flexibility of the BSC concept allows for its application in various situations and functional areas (e.g., shared services, support units, departments), research and literature on the BSC application in specific functional areas are rare. Only recently, with an increasing number of firms starting to utilize the capacity of BSCs to also better manage their strategies in purchasing, logistics, and supply chain management, have we seen literature on BSCs in these areas. Whilst there are some—mostly practitioner oriented—contributions on the use of BSCs in logistics (e.g., Liberatore and Miller, 1998; Siepermann, 2003) or supply chain management (e.g., Brewer and Speh, 2000 and Brewer and Speh, 2001; Stölzle et al., 2001; Weber et al., 2002; Zimmermann, 2002; Kaufmann, 2004), there are no academic and only a few managerial publications on BSCs in purchasing (e.g., Axelsson et al., 2002; Buchholz and Roos, 2002; Engelhardt, 2002; Boutellier and Wagner, 2003; De Quervain and Wagner, 2003; Wagner, 2003 and Wagner, 2004; Aich and Fiedler, 2004). Our premises for this research were first that the purchasing-BSC (P-BSC) can help to effectively formulate and implement purchasing strategies, and second that firms would be better positioned to succeed in initiating and using P-BSCs if they are aware of typical barriers which they may encounter and if they are prepared to avoid or overcome them. The research underlying this article was designed to uncover the most common barriers and to aid managers in overcoming them. Furthermore, our research which is built on empirical data ought to be more rigorous than the hitherto published prescriptive or conceptual articles. Section 2 briefly introduces the building blocks of the BSC concept which are important for the later discussion of the barriers. In Section 3, the research approach underlying this article is described. Specifically, we discuss the rationale for and use of a multiple case study approach to the implementation of BSCs in purchasing. Section 4 delineates, analyzes, and discusses barriers that companies need to be aware of when P-BSCs are initiated and set up. We will elaborate on each barrier based on the experiences from our case studies as well as the literature and give suggestions on how to overcome them. The same will be done in Section 5 for barriers that might be encountered during roll-out and ongoing use of P-BSCs. The final sections summarize the key findings and provide recommendations for further research.

نتیجه گیری انگلیسی

As general attempts to holistically measure purchasing performance are not new (e.g., Berqvist, 1958; Van Weele, 1984), a question in this context is whether the P-BSC will be established as a regular management concept or whether it will be remembered in a couple of years as one of many management fads. Our research shows that the P-BSC can bring speed and simplicity to the implementation of purchasing strategies and that it has an enormous potential to contribute to firms’ competitive position. After having dealt with the barriers the firms encountered throughout the P-BSC process, all firms were highly satisfied with the result, i.e. the implemented purchasing strategy. Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that P-BSCs will survive in organizations as long as managers pay proper attention to the potential pitfalls while creating and using the P-BSC. These pitfalls, however, are not a problem that has its roots in the concept itself. Firms must be able to anticipate, avoid, and provide solutions for these “typical” barriers quickly. For the most part, previous research and earlier publications have neglected P-BSCs. Recent and widespread interest in P-BSCs in practice and the lack of prior research on the P-BSC per se and the barriers in particular motivated this research. For researchers, the findings presented in this article provide a broadened perspective of the barriers that companies are facing during initiation, set-up, roll-out, and ongoing use of P-BSCs, and a better understanding of its successful application. Together with other research on success factors related to BSCs for corporate and business unit strategies (e.g., Ahn, 2001; Kaufmann, 2002), it can serve to guide future research on strategy management and performance measurement in purchasing. Although managers were satisfied with the progress of strategy implementation, this research does not elaborate whether successfully implemented P-BSCs serve to promote success. One demanding challenge for further research is, therefore, to explore the relationships between P-BSCs and purchasing performance or even company performance. Today, empirical studies of these relationships also do not exist for BSCs in general. Another major challenge for corporate practice is to intensify the application of the BSC concept in a supplier relationship, supply chain, or even supply network setting, and for academic research to advance beyond conceptual and prescriptive analysis (e.g., Brewer and Speh, 2001; Kaufmann, 2004). Finally, the present study investigated only companies in German-speaking countries. While Switzerland, Germany, and Austria have very similar business cultures (e.g., Hofstede, 1984; Schwartz, 1994), the findings may be different across cultural settings. As more companies come to understand strategy processes in purchasing and P-BSCs, and become aware of their potential, P-BSC applications will most likely continue to grow. This, in turn, will further increase the need to research P-BSCs and related topics.