Da estratégia corporativa às práticas de compras: um survey exploratório sobre o alinhamento estratégico aplicado à seleção de fornecedores

Abstract

The purchasing function has been recognized as having strategic importance and being a potential generator of competitive advantages, especially in the process of supplier management. Thus, there has been a growing interest in the supplier selection process and its strategic role within the organization, since it supports the corporate strategy by structuring formal decision models that support the long-term strategy and strategic positioning. Therefore, the alignment between corporate strategy, competitive priorities and purchasing strategy are key elements for achieving a good economic performance. In order to understand this relationship in detail, the purpose of this article is to clarify how the corporate strategy is deployed to the practices of the purchasing function, in particular the selection of suppliers, taking into consideration criteria of sustainability and innovation. Ten propositions regarding the alignment between corporate strategy and practices of the function were presented based on the review of literature. The database was collected through a survey with professionals of the purchasing function through the publication of an online questionnaire and tabulation of the answers. To analyze the collected data, contingency tables, multiple correlation analysis, and cluster analysis were used. Results suggest that the strategic alignment between corporate strategy and supplier selection occurs, however, there is a strong influence of the procurement categories in this process. This indicates that there is still an intermediate element between the purchasing strategy and the supplier selection process, which carries out the strategic selection of the criteria coming from function strategy to be applied in the supplier selection process in each of the procurement categories.