Research

Bid management is an important presales process that involves not just pricing but also determining requirement fit and managing ambiguities. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the challenges of coordinating bid activities across the engineering–commercial interface from the systems thinking, contingency, coordination and engineering perspectives. A thematic analysis of an internal survey and four embedded case studies were conducted on multiple affiliated business units across diverse product segments and geographic markets in the electronic manufacturing services (EMS) industry. The results show that challenges in any EMS bid can be distilled into the inter-related categories of price/cost, quote lead time, cost-accuracy, coordination and technical knowledge/capability. Moreover, the embedded cases suggest that engineering-based solutions, such as quality function deployment, target costing and value engineering, can be useful if suitably applied, but fulfilling diverse bid requests using generic processes can hinder effective bid management. The authors propose three principles in a framework for EMS bid management, namely (1) bid management can be modelled as an open system; (2) process focus and integration mechanisms are structural requirements in effective bid systems; and (3) a contingency approach can help alleviate the increasing complexity of bids. This study contributes to the literature by proposing a contingency model of engineering-based approaches according to product archetype and a practical framework for bid management to drive intra-organisational coordination and competitive bids in the EMS industry.

Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) is a means of facilitating cross-functional coordination, such as across the marketing-operations interface, but adopters of S&OP have not all benefited from S&OP to the same extent. This paper investigates the effect of S&OP on supply chain performance using the perspective of coordination and contingency theories. A structural equation model was developed in which six S&OP coordination mechanisms were hypothesized to contribute to improved supply chain performance. The model was tested using a global survey of 568 experienced S&OP practitioners. Our results indicate that Strategic Alignment and Information Acquisition/Processing are the mechanisms that most significantly enable superior S&OP outcomes. However, we find that a highly formalized S&OP Procedure inhibits supply chain performance. Furthermore, using a contingency theory perspective, increasing firm size and increasing experience in S&OP amplify the negative effect of a standardized S&OP Procedure upon supply chain performance. Our results suggest that organizational bricolage may be a coordinating mechanism of effective S&OP programs and that managers should empower ambidextrous S&OP teams to maintain balance using self-governing event-driven processes. This paper makes a novel contribution to the S&OP literature by providing evidence of a theoretical construct (organizational bricolage), which may trigger a re-evaluation of the efficacy of prescriptive S&OP procedures that have been advocated by some researchers and practitioners.

Warehouses are large emitters of greenhouse gases and their impact on climate change is under increasing focus. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the barriers that inhibit the adoption of low-carbon warehousing in Asia-Pacific and their links to carbon abatement performance. An exploratory conceptual model was first developed from a literature review of the general barriers to sustainable supply chain practices and hence potentially in low-carbon warehousing. A large contract logistics services provider in the Asia-Pacific served as the subject of a case study. The perceived barriers to low-carbon warehousing were derived from an internal survey of respondents from the case company and regressed against carbon abatement outcomes at that organization’s operations across the region. Findings – Results show that the case company reduced carbon emissions by 36 percent on a revenue-normalized basis between 2008 and 2014, but with relatively lower success in emerging markets vs mature markets. An Elastic Net regression analysis confirms that technology and government-related factors are the most important barriers in the case company’s efforts to “decarbonize” its local warehousing operations. However, results suggest that the customer-related barrier, which is highly correlated with the government barrier, is in part driven by the latter. This case study is based on a single multinational company in Asia-Pacific, but nonetheless serves as an impetus for more cross-sectional studies to form an industry-wide view. An extended stewardship framework based on the natural resource-based view has been proposed, in which logistics services providers take on a proactive boundary-spanning role to lower the external barriers to low-carbon warehousing.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the implementation and performance benefits of sales and operations planning (S&OP) within organizations in Asia Pacific. A case study method was used, with two companies selected. The first company had recently commenced S&OP and applied it to facilitate new product introduction, while the second had integrated its supplier into an existing S&OP program. Supply chain performance data were collected and analyzed in the context of an S & OP maturity framework. Both cases show significant improvements in supply chain performance. In one case, the implementation of a common form of S&OP resulted in a 67 percent reduction in order lead time for newly introduced products. The second case demonstrated a 30 percent reduction in inventory levels and a 52 percent improvement in forecast accuracy through more advanced S&OP processes. This paper studies just two companies and is not intended to be representative of outcomes at all companies implementing S&OP. Further studies are required for a more generalized picture of S&OP implementations in the Asia Pacific region to emerge. The findings illustrate the potential quantitative benefits of adopting S&OP and the circumstances under which these benefits may be achieved. The results are also supportive of the notion of a maturity model for S&OP implementations. This paper strengthens the link between practitioner and academic literature by providing empirical evidence of the benefits of S&OP. Furthermore, the findings are derived from the Asia Pacific region for which there have been few academic studies on S&OP to date.