Value Co-Creation in Industrial Buyer-Seller Partnerships ... - Doria

In summary the two most obvious triggers from the Buyer’ s side to initiate the partnershipwere to cope with a situation of dependence – to have a trusted partner with whom to shareresponsibility. And to lower total operational costs in the long run.Along the way there have been incidents and actions taken by the parties that have not beendirectly positive for the development of a cooperative way of working. The Buyer has set uptheir own riding crew and they have chosen other suppliers than the Seller for newbuildings. The Seller has in turn not bee able to meet up to the customers demand on aservice agreement in the late 1990’ s and has not always been completely successful in beingpro-active in communicating technical problems to the Buyer. Still the partnership has beenmoving forward and after the second partnership seminar in May 2004 the parties decided toextend the cooperation agreement for the next five years.An interesting point worth noting is that the Seller recently has been nominated anaward for “ best supplier” by the Buyer. Also during the research process of carrying outinterviews and discussions at the Buyer, the Seller partnership was often mentioned as anexample of how things ought to work with a supplier, indications of how well it works - thatthis partnership is showing the direction for developing relationships with other importantsuppliers. This would imply that the partnership was not perceived to be working as bad assome of the interviewees presented it. However, at this instance I must make a comment onthe researcher’ s impact on the situation; it is obvious that a study such as the one that I wasconducting, and the interview situation, can be seen as good opportunities to raise one’ svoice in order to communicate something and get a message across to the other party.The road towards a partnership between the Seller and the Buyer has been long andeventful. The process has been characterized by a strong vision in the partnership idea bymanagement, on one hand, and on several episodes that could be seen as destructive for thepartnership, on the other hand. In a sense one might be tempted to question the wholeexistence of a partnership between the companies – are there enough motives to support thepartnership strategy in this particular relationship? In a sense this is all about choice ofperspective and defining what kind of partnership is intended in this specific context. It isclear that the vision of the Seller of being a total-solutions -provider is not supported by theBuyer’ s vision of optimizing the operations of the whole fleet in the long run by doing allthe service work in-house. The challenge is to seek for and find the criticalinterdependencies for value co-creation and to exploit these interdependencies.Obviously the partnership between the two companies is seeking its form - from being justan ordinary link in a traditional supply chain, into being something that could be called avalue co-creating partnership. Where there is room for innovating, testing, and developingnew solutions together, and coming up with new ideas that can be utilized by bothcompanies more widely, even in other relationships. Given the long history of this particular134