 Purchasing: Can we bridge the gap between strategy and daily reality?Desirée Knoppen and María J. Sáenz Business Horizons, 2015, vol. 58, issue 1, 123-133 Abstract: A lot has been said about strategic purchasing: it contributes to the firm's strategic dialogue, acquires important resources from outside the firm, and plays a vital role in the achievement of the firm's long-term goals. Practice, however, demonstrates the difficulty of translating these intentions into daily reality. In this article, we identify the path between strategic intentions and sustained performance based on a combined quantitative and qualitative research methodology with an embedded level of analysis, including the firm and category level. The implementation of strategic purchasing leverages the liaison role of purchasing when connecting external suppliers with internal clients and ensures the development of purchasing's learning capabilities so that results do not erode over time. We identify key pitfalls to proceeding along the path: no time for reflection, a lack of scale, a lack of scope, and unaligned incentives. Consequently, we present practical guidelines to purchasing managers for avoiding these pitfalls and developing dynamic capabilities, which are vital in times of continuous and unpredictable change. Keywords: Purchasing; Strategic planning; Dynamic capabilities; Learning; Supplier relationships; Supply chain risk (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:bushor:v:58:y:2015:i:1:p:123-133 DOI: 10.1016/j.bushor.2014.09.006 Access Statistics for this article Business Horizons is currently edited by C. M. Dalton More articles in Business Horizons from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.