Research phase evaluated with the following criteria: controllability, reliability,

In a production company one of the central goals is to meet the quality criteria for the goods produced. These quality criteria could be the width, strength or thickness of the product. Quality criteria are also important for business problem-solving projects, as these projects could also be evaluated on several criteria. Criteria business problem-solving projects are mostly evaluated on are research-oriented criteria.128 The research phase of this project have been evaluated on the criteria controllability, reliability, validity and recognition of results.

Van Aken et al. describes controllability as “a prerequisite for the evaluation of validity and reliability”.129

The results of the research should be controllable and therefore, researchers should reveal the way how the study is executed. This chapter has revealed the way how this research was conducted, by revealing which data collection methods were used, what

questions were asked and how the data was analysed. So the descriptions about the

methodology gives other researchers the possibility to replicate this research and it is possible to check if this will lead to the same outcomes.130

The second quality criterion is reliability, which is the overall consistency of a measure. Something is unreliable if you cannot depend on it, like a car that occasionally fails to start or a person who does not keep it promises. Van Aken et al. describes four potential sources of biases, which are the researcher, the instrument, the respondents and the situation. Those four sources can harm the reliability of the research. The researcher can have a huge impact on the reliability of the research results. According to Goldman the biases of a researcher can be hot or cold. The influence of the interest, motivations and emotions of a researcher towards the research results are hot biases. In some cases, researchers want to please some parties in an organisation and shape their conclusions to do so. The researcher of this research was completely new at Company X and therefore, no relationship existed with employees of Company X So the researcher had no intention to handle in such a way to please any party based on interest, emotions or motivations. Cold biases are the subjective influences of the researcher and are cognitive of origin. An example of a cold bias is that researchers pays more attention to evidence which confirms their beliefs than to the evidence which do not confirm

128

See van Aken et al. (2007), p. 155.

129 _{Van Aken et al. (2007), p. 157.} 130 _{See van Aken et al. (2007), p. 157.}

their beliefs. It is difficult to counteract this bias, but a few options to decrease the chance of this bias were used in this research. Standardisation of data collection was used so the

researcher had at least a sort of fixed way to conduct the interviews. Also multiple sources of evidence were used, so if evidence was found in multiple sources it is logical that the

researcher focuses on those results.131 The multiple sources of evidence increase the reliability, as using only one research instrument can yield unreliable results. This approach is called triangulation and have a positive influence on biases, as the used instruments are completing and correcting each other. Also in this research multiple sources of evidence are used, like literature findings, interviews, focus groups and business documents.132 Also respondents can cause biases, as the question arise if the chosen respondent will provide the same answers as another respondent. At this research different respondents where used in the interview phase as well as in the phase with the focus groups. The respondents participating in the interviews were chosen based on their function. In this phase it was important to get a good overview of the perspective of this research topic within the whole company. Therefore, participants were chosen wide across the company, from different departments. At a later stadium, the phase with the focus groups, the participants were chosen based on their knowhow about a specific topic and the participants were mostly of the same department. It should be also taken into account that the respondents only can answer questions based on their knowhow. So for instance, by the questions about the risk sources of suppliers a respondent only mentions those risk sources he or she knows or have experienced.133 The last source of unreliability focus on the circumstances of the research. Different research circumstances can lead to different research results. The researcher tried to create the same circumstances for all the interviews. The interviews were always held at the office of the interviewee where no one else was

around, so the interviewee would speak freely. Furthermore, the setup of the meetings with the several focus groups were also the same. As the meetings were always in the same conference room, with the same structure and presentation. In this way the researcher tried create the same circumstances within all the research methods.134

131 _{See Goldman (1999), p. 230.} 132

See van Aken et al. (2007), p. 160.

133 _{See van Aken et al. (2007), p. 161.} 134 _{See van Aken et al. (2007), p. 162.}

The third criterion to evaluate the research results is validity. “Validity refers to the relationship between a research result or conclusion and the way it has been generated”.135 One way of checking this relationship is done by checking if the measuring instrument also measures what was intended, the so called construct validity. In one case, within this research a measurement instrument did not completely cover all the intended concepts and therefore, additional measurement instruments were used. This was the case by determining the critical material groups of Company X With the results out of the interviews with the employees of Company X this question could not be answered. Therefore, additional research has been carried out by making use of business documentation of Company X, as mentioned in chapter 3.2.2.

The last quality criterion is very important in applied research, the recognition of results. This refers to the level of agreement of the problem owners towards the research results. So do the members of Company X recognise the outcomes of the research. This has been checked multiple times during this research. First of all, several times during the research meetings were planned with the project group to present and discuss the results so far. Also at the end of the research a meeting was planned with the project group to present and discuss the final results with the members. According to van Aken et al. this approach increases the chance that the members of an organisation recognise the results.136

3.5 Conclusion

This chapter will provide an overall conclusion of the methodology part of this research. In chronological order the steps taken during the research phase will be repeated. During this research the theory of business problem-solving has been followed. After the problem

definition and the research questions were formulated, a literature study have been conducted, see chapter 2. The first field research was conducted shortly after, which were the interviews with employees of Company X and Company Y. The aim of these semi-structured interviews was to get information about the most important material groups and the most common risk sources at Company X, ways to assess supplier risks and actions to take if certain risks are discovered. With these interviews a lot of usable information have been retrieved. Yet, two

135 _{Van Aken et al. (2007), p. 163.} 136 _{See van Aken et al. (2007), p. 167.}

additional research methods have been used to get an answer on the question what the most important material groups of Company X are. This has been done, because this question could not be answered with only the results of the interviews. Business documentation, in the form of deviation/G8D reports and documentation of Company Y and Company Z have been analysed to get an answer on this question.

After the interviews results were analysed a meeting with the project group was scheduled. During this meeting the first results were presented and a solution proposal, a supplier risk evaluation model, has been pitched. The project group has provided the project owner during these frequent meetings with valuable feedback and directions for the project. This will be discussed more in detail in chapter 4.4.

Also focus groups were formed during this research. These focus groups have made a contribution to the solution of this project. Their information have been used as input for the established norm of the risk evaluation model.

4.

Results: Business documentation and insights of employees of