Operations and Supply Chain Management Commons^™

Enhancing Dyadic Performance Through Boundary Spanners And Innovation: An Assessment Of Service Provider–Customer Relationships, Scott J. Grawe, Patricia J. Daughterty, Peter M. Ralston

Peter Ralston

Firms recognize that working together through collaborative relationships offers potential benefits such as improving cooperation, information sharing, and overall performance. An additional and extremely valuable benefit of working together is the potential for creating innovative business approaches and solutions. Thus, developing external linkages has become a higher priority within many organizations. Boundary spanning employees offer one means of achieving closer cross‐firm relationships. We investigate the roles of boundary spanners by examining service providers and their relationships with customers. More specifically, we examine boundary spanning employees that are physically on‐site at customer facilities. Results provide strong support that boundary spanners perceiving …

Intra-Organizational Communication, Understanding, And Process Diffusion In Logistics Service Providers, Scott J. Grawe, Peter M. Ralston

Peter Ralston

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate, using survey data, how a firm may be able to leverage innovation or processes specifically developed for one customer across its entire customer network using onsite, or implanted, employees.

Design/methodology/approach – Data collected from a survey of 309 implanted logistics service provider (LSP) representatives are analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Findings – The findings show that intra-organizational task interdependence and face-to-face communication can lead to a greater understanding of firm processes developed for specific customers and greater diffusion of these new processes to other customers. Rather than separating customers that …

Impact Of Life-Cycle Costs Threshold Criteria In The Alternate Design Pavement Bidding Practices Of Public Transportation Agencies, Ilker Karaca, Douglas Gransberg, Ashley F. Buss

Ilker Karaca

This paper proposes a model that enables Department of Transportation (DOT) policy makers to quantify the expected volume of projects that will qualify for letting in their alternate design/alternate bid (ADAB) pavement bidding programs. Current guidance on alternate bidding recommends a fixed percentage as the life cycle cost (LCC) threshold criterion to determine whether pavement selection decisions should be made through ADAB bidding practices. The paper’s analysis shows that the fixed LCC threshold percentage approach may have considerable shortcomings. Instead, a dynamic threshold value is proposed that can subsequently be calibrated by agencies, based on the desired size of their …