بلوغ مدیریت عرضه، صرفه جویی در هزینه و در خرید ظرفیت جذب: تست لینک تدارکات عملکرد

The relationship between the development level a purchasing organisation has reached—maturity—and its impact on the performance of a firm has received only limited attention until now. We conducted extensive purchasing audits using a comprehensive tool to assess firms’ maturity level. These firms’ performance was then measured by their success in a purchasing cost-reduction programme. The results showed a highly significant relationship between purchasing's maturity level and cost-reduction results. Somewhat counter-intuitively, larger saving potential was identified in more developed firms. This finding may be explained by a new concept called “purchasing absorptive capacity”. If an organisation's maturity is too low, the introduction of best practices, such as an innovative cost-reduction method, may fail.

In the recent years, purchasing volume expressed as a percentage of a firm's total turnover has risen substantially. Under these circumstances, a better performance by the purchasing function may make a considerable contribution to the overall performance of a firm (Carter and Narasimhan, 1996; Goh et al., 1999; Carr and Smeltzer, 1999a; Shin et al., 2000; Narasimhan and Das, 2001; Carr and Pearson, 2002; Sánchez-Rodríguez et al., 2005). The extent to which purchasing can fulfil this new responsibility, however, may depend on its development level or maturity. Linking states of development to performance is the underlying assumption of literature on stage or maturity level models, also referred to as typologies. Maturity has been defined as “the level of professionalism in the purchasing function” (Rozemeijer et al., 2003, p. 7). A maturity model describes several—auditable—stages an organisation is expected to go through in its quest for greater sophistication. Mature purchasing organisations apply world-class best practices, while unsophisticated organisations fail to employ them (Chiesa et al., 1996; Ellram et al., 2002). The assumption is that greater maturity is associated with better performance. Therefore, measuring purchasing maturity can be useful for testing the link between the quality of the purchasing function and its contribution to a firm's performance in general and its financial performance in particular. Literature has put forward about a dozen purchasing maturity models (Table 1). Most of the models are conceptual in nature. Keough (1993) specifies that companies can save between 5% and 10% by moving from one stage to the next, but he fails to substantiate this assertion. At the same time, there are intriguing reports that under-performing firms say they apply more best practices, thus claiming to have reached a more mature status (Ellram et al., 2002). This discussion gives rise to questions about whether there really is a straightforward purchasing maturity–performance link, what are its limits and why attempting to increase purchasing maturity by introducing best practices may fail to improve financial performance. To remedy this lack of clarity, this paper provides empirical backing for the maturity–performance link with highly valid firm-level data. We employ the most comprehensive maturity model found in the literature. Further, the paper expands theory by introducing the novel concept of purchasing absorptive capacity and by defining a limit to best-practice introduction, the “minimum maturity point”. In our study the performance data were collected from sources other than the maturity assessment. Using different sources of data avoids the common method bias, which raises doubts about the validity of results if respondents assess both their own organisation's quality and its performance (Doty and Glick, 1998; Podsakoff et al., 2003; Spector, 2006). We audited 14 comparable firms in one industry by assessing them with the aid of an extensive maturity profile. This is analogous to a series of replicated case studies (Yin, 2003). The performance data were derived from a parallel project which introduced a novel method for identifying savings in commodity groups in the audited firms. This innovative method of pinpointing cost savings was applied in 40 workshops within the audited firms. We then matched the maturity of the respective purchasing organisations—as expressed by the audit results—with their performance in the commodity cost-reduction programme—as expressed by the savings potentials generated in the workshops. That is, cross-functionally verified savings potential has been used as a measure, reflecting expected future performance. This paper is organised as follows: after discussing the maturity concept and deriving the maturity model used, we report on the process and the results of its application. We then discuss the findings using the absorptive capacity concept, thus expanding the theory and deriving conclusions.

This paper describes the relationship between purchasing maturity and financial performance. Purchasing maturity was measured by audits based on a comprehensive maturity profile. Financial performance was measured by the results of a series of commodity cost-reduction workshops which ran in parallel to the audits. The workshops defined new commodity strategies and estimated their monetary value. It was found that, on average, more mature firms identified larger savings potential than did their underdeveloped counterparts. This relationship was statistically significant, despite the small sample size. Purchasing absorptive capacity offers an explanation for this finding. From this discussion it may be concluded that: (1) The positive relationship between purchasing maturity and performance in identifying savings may encourage firms to set up more sophisticated purchasing functions. Our results indicate that resources dedicated to this purpose can be an investment that has a reasonable chance of paying off. (2) The concept of absorptive capacity can fruitfully be transferred to the supply-management realm. It provides a theoretical explanation for the finding that the more developed purchasing organisations profit most from newly introduced knowledge like the lever workshop method. The novel concept of an absorptive capacity in purchasing thus enriches the theoretical debate about purchasing and merits further elaboration. (3) Understanding the minimum maturity point of an organisation, below which there is nothing to be gained from introducing best practices, is an important managerial task. It enables managers to avoid over-investing in methods, tools and so on that the firm is not yet ready to absorb. Because of the small sample size, our results give only a first indication of the relationship between maturity and performance, and their application is currently focused on a single industry, metal manufacturing. This limited application is reinforced by a more general criticism of maturity models: the assumption that there is one best way for all firms to behave. This could be particularly true for service firms, which may require a different set of maturity criteria than industrial firms do. Therefore, this study should ideally be replicated with a larger sample in several kinds of industries. It may also be rewarding to understand which elements of maturity are most important and their effects. Future research should also be dedicated to more “extreme” firms. This study took the perspective of “normal” firms with a maturity score between 35% and 55%. The sample did not include any really basic purchasing organisations. On the extremes of the spectrum, a different relationship between sophistication and savings might appear. One possibility is that very sophisticated firms, after reaching a peak, might run into an area of diminishing returns on maturity. Finally, it should be noted that purchasing's contribution to a firm's performance is not limited to cost reduction. It may be interesting to link maturity to other performance indicators such as innovation.