Sustainable Competitive Advantage

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MARK1171: Foundations of Scholarship Literature review L Zhou

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BU/PG 70.00% 23/11/2011

Coursework is receipted on the understanding that it is the student's own work and that it has not, in whole or part, been presented elsewhere for assessment. Where material hasbeen used from other sources it has been properly acknowledged in accordance with the University's Regulations regarding Cheating and Plagiarism.

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Juan Roa Caranton

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Sustainable competitiveadvantage through Inter-organizational culture

INTRODUCTION In recent years organizations have understand that they do not work alone, that every organization is part of a network, a network of organizations that work together in order to satisfy a final customer (Pamela, Danese. 2011), it is necessary to understand the network as a system where all the process are related one to the other and “itsinputs and outputs are affected by the behaviour of other players in the network” (Harrison, Alan and van Hoek, Remko. 2011:12). Nowadays satisfy the customer is becoming more difficult because of the globalization, the competence has increase bringing a vast variety of products with lower prices. As content by Meixel “increased challenges of globalization, increased use of outsourcing, vendormanaged inventory and advanced planning systems, increased demands of integration led to a broadened supply chain definition” (Meixell and Gargeya, 2005 cited in Akyuz and Turan, 2010).So, the efforts of the SC has increase always looking for better prices, better quality, flexibility and availability, that is why firms have to always be looking for the best partners (suppliers, retailers etc.) inorder to be competitive. All this changes became more complex when they are analyse from the point of view of the SC, where every partner brings their unique culture, different objectives and strategies creating cultural barriers for integration along the network (McCarter et al, 2005), therefore the achievement of an effective SC depends on the collaboration and communication between the partnersinto the system (Pramatari, 2007cited in Wang, 2010). In order to be an effective supply chain, management should look for reduce the cultural barriers and increase the integration of the key business process along the SC (Gimenez and Lourenco, 2004, cited in Akyuz and Turan, 2010) trying to align their objectives and strategies would lead to get a more leaner, efficient, effective, selflearning and sustainable SC (Bahinipati et al, 2009). In this paper it is going to be analyze the necessity of having a strong culture along the SC a culture that belongs to every part of the SC because they are sharing the same objectives and strategies so, it will be more flexible and more effective creating a competitive advantage very difficult to imitate. Sharing the same culture would along the SCwill provide a better customer service. Customer service is more difficult to copy than quality and price making it a competitive advantage (Bowersox, Donald. et al. 2010:52). In this paper we are going to analyze how to improve the culture between each part of the SC through communication and it will become a self learning system making it sustainable in time.

LITERATURE REVIEW Supply chaincollaboration

Supply chain collaboration refers to a join of activities between partners in order to achieve a common objective. The output of the shared effort is to transform suboptimal solutions of individual relations in the SC into a comprehensive solution. The common objective of collaboration is to reduce inefficiencies, in order to accomplish it, it is necessary communication. “The...