Supplier Development of SMEs – a case study

This essay is based on a supply chain with Andrénverken AB in Smålandsstenar as the focal actor. Andrénverken is a medium sized firm with 48 employees and is active in the metal components industry. One of their main customers is Tetra Pak to which Andrénverken is a system supplier.

The sampling procedure for this case has been made in two stages:

1. Criteria selection of a supply chain to study, i.e. the Tetra Pak Andrénverken chain

2. A snowball sample of respondents in the supply chain

1. The first step was to select the Tetra Pak Andrénverken supply chain for the study. Also this selection is based on the previously described pre- understanding. My reasons for selecting this case are the following.

First of all, also in this case we have a locomotive, Tetra Pak, that have taken an interesting development initiative for their suppliers and restructured their supply base and the supply chain. Tetra Pak has also spent a lot of resources in this process and funded a lot of the development activities. One aim of this development is that the participating firms should develop dynamic capabilities and the ability to develop their suppliers in turn making this a project with the supply chain as the ultimate scope.

Secondly the Tetra Pak supply chain consists mainly of SMEs that as stated before have limited resources for their development.

The last reason is access. I knew that Tetra Pak had restructured and developed their supply base and I had contacts with one of their suppliers, Andrénverken, since before and when I made contact discussing research possibilities they were positive. Mainly (according to the CEO) because they knew and trusted me since before which has helped me to get access for this research.

The next step was to identify respondents in the chain. The first respondents, representing Andrénverken and Tetra Pak, were made with the help of a snowball sample, i.e. a non probability sample (Lekvall & Wahlbin, 1993).

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Some key persons were easily identified such as the CEO and the purchasing manager of Andrénverken. These persons than guided me to other respondents that they thought were important for the supply chain and the development process. For this research seven people have been interviewed. In all sixteen interviews have been carried out.

Yin (1989) divides interviews into three categories: 1) open-ended interviews, 2) focused interviews, and 3) structured interviews. I have used focused interviews, ranging from half an hour to two hours in length, combining open ended questions about the companies networks with more structured questions. During most of the interviews a tape-recorder was used and transcripts have been sent to all respondents.

Further, observations have been a part of this study as I have visited several production facilities during the research process as well as Tetra Paks supplier forum and the Elmia Subcontractor fair.

Finally the use of secondary data has also been an important part of my study. Secondary data that sources studied for this case study are:

• annual reports • homepages • trade fair journal

• articles in purchasing magazines about the Tetra Pak education project • brochures

• internal material such as quality manuals • educational programs material

• a video describing the change of production organisation in the firms (recorded at the focal actor), Flödesorganisation.

• A book written by Jan Persson (Persson, 2002) about the development of suppliers

This case is mainly based on interviews about developments that have occurred and changes that have been implemented. This means that this case differ from the KrAft-Norrgavel case where I was able to follow the development process “live”.

Trustworthiness

To discuss validity and reliability is as important for case studies as for more positivistic research (Merriam, 1994), since those issues will influence the trustworthiness of the study. It is also necessary to have a discussion about the

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overall quality of the study (Gummesson, 2000). The reliability measure however, is more applicable as a quality measure for quantitative studies than for case studies since one cannot expect two researchers to come up with the exact same interpretation of a case. In the following different types of validity measures are discussed in respect to my research.

A distinction often done when talking about validity is that between internal and external validity. Internal validity is a measure on how well the result of the study and reality fits. In order to secure internal validity researcher can use different strategies of which triangulation is the perhaps most important (Merriam, 1994). In this research several sources of information and methods are used.

External validity is the extent to which results of one investigation can be applicable to other situations than the one investigated, i.e. if the results can be generalised and if so for which population (Merriam, 1994). In my analysis I will distinguish between case specific results and results that are general to a population at large. This is particularly important when discussing a wide topic as supplier development since all supplier development projects are somewhat unique making the external validity somewhat limited.

Another validity measure is construct validity. The construct validity of a study is a measure on how well you as a researcher has managed to transfer the measures of the concepts studied (Yin, 1989). Construct validity is obtained through the use of multiple sources of evidence and participant control (Yin, 1989); both practices used in this research

By the use of participant control, triangulation (especially in the KrAft- Norrgavel case), clarification of my pre-understanding and theoretical standpoints I believe that I presented trustworthy results. This could however only judged by the reader and by giving an extensive description of my research process I believe that I have made it possible for the readers themselves to evaluate the trustworthiness and quality of my work.

References

Gummesson, E. (2000), Qualitative Methods in Management Research 2nd

edition, Thousand Oaks, Sage

Lekvall, P., & Wahlbin, C. (1993) Information för marknadsföringsbeslut, Göteborg, IHM Förlag AB (3:e uppl.), (in Swedish)

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Merriam, S. (1994), Fallstudien som forskningsmetod, Lund, Studentlitteratur (in Swedish)

Yin, R. (1989), Case study research - design and methods 2nd

edition, Newbury