Buyer influence and supplier development in buyer-driven global supply chains

This thesis identifies different kinds of supplier abilities needed by different types of buyers and explores suppliers' investment decisions caused by buyers' supply needs in global apparel supply chains. To date, much of the thinking about supplier development in global supply chains has been focused on buyer firms' efforts that lead to the improvement of suppliers' abilities to meet buyers' competitive strategic goals. However, according to the theory of global commodity chains, it is also critical for suppliers to develop their own abilities by understanding their buyer's evolving needs of supplies' abilities. Suppliers must pay attention to the changing needs of their buyers because buyers can easily switch to suppliers offering more favorable terms, particularly when the goods or services produced are viewed as commodities. This thesis turns our attention to supplier firms that proactively drive development efforts by continuously adjusting and enhancing their abilities in order to sustain competitiveness in global supply chains.; This thesis focused on global apparel supply chains, a prototypical supply chain in which different types of buyers continuously reconfigure decentralized production networks for non-core activities in a variety of exporting countries. Attention was paid specifically to global apparel supply chains that consisted of U.S. buyers and Korean suppliers in order to control external variance and to improve internal validity. Given the exploratory nature of the research, this thesis positioned the Delphi study at Phase I to identify different kinds of supplier abilities that are needed by different types of buyers. Then, this study positioned a multiple case study at Phase II in order to explore the interaction that occurs between the supplier abilities needed by buyers and the development of supplier's manufacturing strategies.; The analysis of the Delphi study identified and ranked in order seventeen different supplier abilities that are needed by different types of buyers as well as two underlying dimensions within supplier abilities. Utilizing these two underlying dimensions, this thesis developed a supplier strategy development framework and mapped four archetypes of supplier strategy development identified from the in-depth case studies. This research takes a first step in moving the focus of supplier development research from buying firms to suppliers and understanding the influence of buyer types on the development of supplier strategy in the context of global supply chains.