تجزیه و تحلیل تجربی از روش های مدیریتی تا نقش موجودی

The paper aims to make the first step to the empirical investigation of managers’ perception of the role of inventories in today's business. In a previous paper [Chikán, A., 2004. The new role of inventories in business: real world changes and research consequences. Paper presented at the 13th International Symposium on Inventories. International Journal of Production Economics, to appear] I have stated that there has been a gradual paradigm shift in inventory management in the last decades, due to the extensive changes in the economic and business environment. The main point is that the new paradigm assumes a far more complex role of inventories than in the traditional approach, leading to a strategic role of inventories in a triple role: as contributors to value creation, as means of flexibility and means of control. The new paradigm leads to new needs for research orientation and methodology. The train of thoughts in the earlier conceptual paper is to be checked in practical business environment. This paper reports on a survey of 51 Hungarian companies and explores their view on inventories. The results obtained are reassuring and promising but further research is necessary.

This paper is a next step in a process of disclosing the role of inventories in management after my paper presented at the previous ISIR Symposium in 2004 (Chikán, 2004). The earlier paper was basically an essay about the changes in the business and economic environment and their consequence on inventories and their research. The conclusion of this paper has been that environmental changes have made a significant impact on the role of inventories and its perception by practitioners and academicians alike. Some logical explanations of these changes have been provided in the paper. To explore the real approach of practitioners we have conducted a survey of 51 company managers in Hungary in the Winter of 2005/2006. When evaluating the survey results we have to consider that all these managers have come from manufacturing companies, which may mean a special viewpoint. The methodology of the survey was the following: • I have formulated nine questions which were directly oriented to the managers’ perception and approach to inventories. • We have connected these questions to the questionnaire used to survey manufacturing strategies and practices in the framework of International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS) (www.london.edu) and the Global Manufacturing Research Group (GMRG) (www.cibs.tamu.edu). Both surveys had been conducted several times already in many parts of the world (including Hungary) and both contain a number of questions which are related to inventories. In such a way we have had nine questions directly related to our research focus and a set of complementary questions which could be used to the analysis and discussion of our own questions. The survey was originally sent to 245 companies. Then we asked them by the phone if they are willing to contribute and in case of a positive answer a student, appropriately prepared, had carried the questionnaire to the companies and explained it if it was necessary. Finally, we received 51 questionnaires, which means a response rate of 21%. The IMSS and GMRG surveys were repeated for the fourth time in Hungary, therefore there was no need for a pilot study. In this paper I summarize some of the results of the survey. I of course evaluate first of all the nine specifically inventory-related questions but add also results obtained by using other parts of the survey. The structure of the paper is the following: first a brief conceptual background is given, based mainly on Chikán (2004). Then we go through the inventory-related questions of the survey, analysing them one by one, both the direct answers and some connected other questions of the survey.

The paper summarizes the results of a survey which were concluded in order to learn more about managers’ perception of the role of inventories. Some really interesting conclusions came out from the survey despite of the fact that the inventory questions have been simply added to a questionnaire dealing with manufacturing strategy. First of all, the results overwhelmingly support our main hypotheses about the changing role of inventories. An almost unanimous opinion came through, which considers inventories as integrated parts of the supply chain, as opposed to the traditional view according to which inventories can be handled independently of other company functions. Other elements of the new paradigm of inventory research elaborated in Chikán (2004) have also got support in the survey but because of the shortcomings of the methodology (the lack of organic connection between the inventory-related and other questions) we cannot draw a strong conclusion on that. Some interesting findings are worth mentioning, however, • Correlation between answers to various questions are usually very low, there are only six pairs out of the 28 possibilities where this correlation is significant. This shows two things: on the one hand there are no consistent “streams” among the respondents, but they form a very mixed unstructured group. (Neither the sector which the company belongs to, nor the performance they show turned out to be significant for classification of the respondents.) The six pairs on the other hand could be explained rather well. • Even though the survey results are not reliable enough to draw convincing conclusion about the new inventory paradigm, they are promising enough to think about continuing this empirical research, for which this survey and its evaluation can be a starting point. • This latter statement is supported by the fact that even though majority of the hundreds of correlation analyses which we tried did not show strong connections it did not disclose major contradictions either. Based on all the above I stand by the main points of the train of thoughts given in Chikán (2004) as a conceptual background and I believe that further research will shed more lights on its empirical validity. I think that discussing these issues is of fundamental importance for the further development of inventory research.