International purchasing offices in China: roles and resource/capability requirements

Abstract

Findings -We identify and discuss the importance of 10 roles played by IPOs and 12 required resources/capabilities. Furthermore, considering the changes that occurred to these IPOs over a five-year period (2007-2012), we observe three distinct evolutionary behaviours (i.e. 'overall development', 'selective development', and 'stable configuration') and highlight three contingent factors that jointly affect these behaviours (i.e. the architectural and technological complexity of the sourced items, annual volume sourced abroad, and experience in the foreign context).Originality/value -This paper contributes to the resource-based view of the firm in a global sourcing context by highlighting the resources/capabilities required by IPOs and discussing their characteristics. Furthermore, it proposes a typology of IPO micro-organisational evolutionary behaviours. Finally, it applies contingency theory and identifies three factors that might affect the evolutionary behaviours.

Social Sustainability in Apparel Supply Chains—The Role of the Sourcing Intermediary in a Developing Country

“…In order to answer the third research question, this study attempts to describe the roles performed by IntA by using role theory in supply chain management research [115]. Role theory was applied by several researchers to explore and describe the activities of the boundary-spanners within the supply chain networks [7,85,86,[115][116][117][118]. Knight and Harland [115] reviewed existing constructs with regards to role theory and assess that it is beneficial for analyzing what part a focal company plays in the supply chain network.…”

“…Consequently, besides direct sourcing structures where apparel retailers directly deal with factories, apparel retailers can set up a mediated sourcing structure i.e., where a third party intermediary is in between and consolidates the demand of one or more apparel retailers and sources the garments for each of them from its supplier base [51]. In other words, apparel retailers set up different methods in the form of strategic global management departments or subsidiaries in foreign countries, which act as international purchasing offices (IPOs) [7,85,86] or employ third party (external) sourcing intermediaries such as full service providers and agents [1,6,15,33,51,52,55] who will support focal companies with the management of globally dispersed suppliers to overcome common barriers and find opportunities in their global purchasing strategy. Interestingly, not many papers can be found investigating the role of intermediaries in the apparel industry [1,6,15,33,87] and it is very striking that research still shows a lack in dealing with the role of apparel intermediaries in terms of the management of a sustainable supply chain.…”

Prior to reshoring: A duration analysis of foreign manufacturing ventures

“…Offshore outsourcing, especially in developing countries, can require supplier training and assistance (Jia et al, 2014;Sartor et al, 2015), with specific investments that can be lost in the case of termination of the relationship. Moreover, the knowledge and information exchange that develops in buyer-supplier interactions makes the customer vulnerable to suppliers' opportunistic behaviours (Ettlie & Sethuraman, 2002;Henisz, 2000).…”

A processual analysis of the purchasing and supply organization in transition: the impact of offshoring

“…This is similar to our research setting (which was about relocating PSO activities), in that new coordination mechanisms within the PSO emerge when another unit is established. Finally, the effect of such transitions on the needed resources/capabilities within the PSO would be of interest, in analogy to such changing requirements in the IPO setting (Sartor et al 2015). The use of real-time data over time is suggested or a combinatory approach with the critical incident technique as in this research.…”