The management of supplier relationships for medium sized retail companies: a three-dimensionalsegmentation model

Sammanfattning: Companies have limited human, financial and technical resources, which makes it crucial toallocate them in an efficient way in order to stay competitive in today's market. One way of doing this is to classify a company's suppliers into different categories, and differentiate the management of each supplier category. Previous studies within the field mostly focus on larger, manufacturing companies, and there is a lack of segmentation models suitable for retail firms. Further, existing literature on supplier relationship management fail on giving concrete actions on how to manage different types of suppliers. This study addresses this by extending the literature on supplier segmentation and supplier relationship management in the context of a medium sized retail company offering a diversified product portfolio. The study was performed as a case study on a Nordic retail company that produced both private label products and brand named products, where this study focused on its private label suppliers. The purpose of the study was to develop a supplier segmentation model for guidance in managing supplier relationships for retail companies with diversified product portfolios, and this was met by collecting both qualitative and quantitative data through interviews, workshops, structured questions and archival data. The main findings were a number of identified characteristics of the supplier base of the case company and the determination of different types of buyer-supplier relationships. This ultimately culminated into the empirical contributions of 1) a developed supplier segmentation model suitable for medium sized retail companies offering a diversified product portfolio, and 2) recommended actions on how to manage suppliers, corresponding to each segment in the model.