Working process for Supplier Market Analysis, in line with IKEA's New Business approach

Sammanfattning: The world is continuously changing. Today many companies work hard to keep up with the surrounding world to stay competitive. To work with finding new business opportunities has become of higher importance than ever. IKEA is a global company facing a tremendous growth to reach their goal for 2020. To manage this growth and be able to secure supply to new retail markets, the company needs to increase their supplier base and also find new business opportunities to stay competitive and increase its existing market shares. IKEA has started up New Business, which is both an approach and an organisation. The organisation consists of allocated teams working proactive with finding new business opportunities and new suppliers/development partners. IKEA has found a gap, an absence of a working process for Supply Market Study and Supplier Mapping. These are two important steps in the process of finding new business opportunities and new suppliers/development partners. To facilitate the work and make a global comparison possible the purpose of this project is to develop a working process for Supply Market Study and Supplier Mapping, in line with the New Business approach. To develop a process that works in reality, a constructive research approach was used in this project combined with a multiple case study. The people interviewed were mainly people working in any of the IKEA´s purchasing operations areas, areas covering different geographical zones. Each one of the purchasing operation areas around the globe is a case in the multiple case study performed. A theoretical framework was created from the literature review. From the empirical study, together with a literature review, an analysis was made to generate the foundation for the developing of the working process. The analysis started with a cross-case analysis to identify differences and similarities between the cases to be able to develop an empirical framework. This framework was then compared with the theoretical framework. An interesting finding was that in the literature review, a gap was identified as the transition between the Supply Market Study and the Supplier Mapping, whereas the empirical study stressed the importance of its connection. The result of this was that only one process was developed in this project. The process was named Supplier Market Analysis, consisting of five main steps: Start-up, Macro Analysis, Industry Analysis, Supplier Mapping and Final Evaluation & Project Report. To note, the Supply Market Study is split into two parts, Macro Analysis and Industry Analysis.