Sourcing complexity in the Chinese manufacturing sector: An assessment of intangible factors and contractual relationship strategies

Managing distance in international purchasing and supply: a systematic review of literature from the resource-based view perspective

“…For example, Caddick and Dale (1987) suggest that sourcing from less developed countries is considerably more complex. In this vein, Roth et al (2008) describe the cultural differences in China as a cause of product recalls and Subramanian et al (2015) describe the intangible and tangible factors that contribute to the complexity of sourcing from China, such as culture, infrastructure and regulation.…”

“…Both require specialized human resources, including sourcing competence (Kusaba et al, 2011), adequate and trained staff (Leonidou, 1999) and accumulated experience in general (Rexha & Miyamoto, 2000). Lack of human capital may also serve as a source of sourcing complexity (Subramanian et al, 2015). Furthermore, knowledge resources appear to have a key role because the requirements for knowledge about exchange rates and foreign business practices have been suggested as being important (Birou & Fawcett, 1993), as has having adequate information for identifying and analysing foreign sources (Leonidou, 1999), based, for example, on macro-and micro-level market studies (Caddick & Dale, 1987).…”

“…Swamidass, 1993;Bozarth et al, 1998;Schiele et al, 2011;Beall et al, 2015). However, the seemingly mature body of literature on the subject also describes several barriers and challenges that are associated with achieving successful international supply, such as unexpected costs, delays and complexities, for example due to geographic and cultural distances Holweg et al, 2011;Subramanian et al, 2015), as well as some remedies for these challenges, such as the international purchasing offices (Jia et al, 2014a;Sartor et al, 2015). Despite these efforts, the international purchasing and supply management (IPSM) literature seems to lack a theory-based and a unifying conceptualisation, which would focus on managing the inherent distance, and thus on understanding of IPSM from capability perspective.…”

Port sustainable services innovation: Ningbo port users’ expectation

“…We checked the Consistency Ratio (CR) to appraise the reliability of responses from questionnaires. If CR is higher than 0.1, judgments should be revised once again until we reach a consistent judgment (Satty, 1990;Noble and Sanchez, 1993;Subramanian et al, , 2015). Table 3 shows the local weight of criteria.…”

Strategic supplier selection using multi-stakeholder and multi-perspective approaches

“…The paper, "Sourcing complexity in the Chinese manufacturing sector: An assessment of intangible factors and contractual relationship strategies" by Subramanian et al (2015), deploys the importance-complexity matrix analysis with a sample of 101 original equipment manufacturers based in China to investigate the impact of intangible factors on sourcing complexity. Their findings show that lack of knowledge, quality issues, price erosion, increase in comparative price levels, supply risk, and demand volatility are the most critical intangible factors contributing to the sourcing complexity.…”