This course revolved around the important and contemporary issues of building, managing, and maintaining relationships in and across supply chains to build and maintain a competitive advantage.

Most Supply Chains span various different companies across different continents – this makes the interaction between various parties involved in the chain difficult. For most parties involved this means that managing supplier and customer relations is crucial. In this course we depart from the perspective of a focal manufacturing company and focus primarily on the upstream part of the supply chain. We focus on business-to-business (B2B) buyer-supplier relations and use theoretical perspectives and concepts of Purchasing and Supply Management (PSM) to study these relations. Theoretical considerations will be enriched with plenty application to current industry development, discussion of examples and guest lectures by practitioners and experts. So, as opposed to the Supply Chain Operations course, this course deals with Supply Chain activities in which various parties are involved. In particular, it addresses the development and management of relationships between the different supply chain partners. We study the nature of different relationships between buyers and suppliers, and the role purchasing professionals play to establish valuable long-term collaborative relationships. Topics that will be covered in this course are amongst others: purchasing management, strategic sourcing, early supplier involvement (ESI), buyer-supplier relationships, partnerships and supplier development, customer relationship management, sustainability and other contemporary hot topics in the PSM domain. Examination will be in the form of a written exam combined with a number of case reports, in–class participation, facilitations and an interactive workshop that student teams have to plan, prepare and conduct for a specific theme (e.g. sustainability, innovation etc.).

The literature is a mix of text-book readings (e.g. Purchasing and Supply Chain Management: A Sustainability Perspective, 2014. Thomas E. Johnsen, Mickey Howard, Joe Miemczyk, Routledge, London, ISBN 978-0-415-69088-1) and selected academic articles from peer-reviewed journals (e.g. Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management, Journal of Supply Chain Management). As the literature list is frequently updated, the course coordinator will announce the reading list before the start of the course.

Apart from the general prerequisites that count for any MSc course, students should have passed intermediate level (Applied) management courses at 2nd or 3rd year BA level of at least 13 ECTS credits.
Compulsory course of Master Global Supply Chain Management & Change (Venlo).