Partnership-based Supply Chain Integration, Research, And Competitive Advantage

With the development of the fierce market competition, more and more enterprises expect to confront complicated environment, avoid risks and improve the management achievements by establishing supply chain partnership(SCP). Some famous companies, such as Dell, Wal-Mart and HP, have achieved many successful experiences. After analyzing these successful cases,many scholars think SCP can not only coordinates a series of contradictions caused by diverse goals among different enterprises, but also help to form core competitive power, which makes it strong enough to prevent competitor from entering. However, some other scholars think that partnership is only the external resource, which is very difficult to internalize to its own competitive advantage because of the varying and complex environment and its own limited capability. Good integration ability is the essential condition for external resources to exert a long-term function. Many facts reflect this point. A lot of enterprises devote plenty of manpower and money to constructing supply chain partnership and expect to get an effective improvement in cost, quality and management achievements etc., but most effects are not obvious; indeed, it is very hard to obtain competitive advantage by SCP. The contradiction between theory and reality confused a lot of enterprisers. Is the promotion of enterprise competitive advantage through partnership a hypothesis or an inevitable logic?According to the current problems in supply chain management of many enterprises, the present work systematically integrates different studies about partnership, supply chain integration and competitive advantage et al, which separately derived from Resource and Ability Theory, Transaction Cost Theory, Value Chain Theory and Principal-agent Theory. With the study paradigm of structure-conduct-performance, three different pathways are used to design the study hypothesis and concept model, including partnership-competitive advantage pathway, partnership-supply chain integration pathway and partnership-supply chain integration- competitive advantage pathway. Based on designing questionnaires and collecting data, the simulated effects of various hypothesis and models were investigated by analyzing corresponding data through factor analysis approach, reliability analysis, validity analysis, lilnear structural relation model (LISREL) analysis and differential analysis of structure-facet relationship. The interaction mechanisms and relationships among partnership, supply chain integration and competitive advantage were investigated. The work also studies how to acquire the essential effect after integration of supply chain through partnership.The main conclusions of this study include: 1, The direct acting effect of partnership on competitive advantage is not obvious. It is not an effective method to acquire competitive advantage through constructing partnership. 2, The indirect effect of partnership on competitive advantage through supply integration is far more significant than the direct effect. To intensify the construction of integration ability is the key to acquire competitive advantage through constructing partnership. 3. The existence of partnership exhibit much influence on external integration of supply chain. Enterprise can promote its own external integration ability by constructing partner alliance. These conclusions provide essential basis for enterprises to carry on long-term planning and strategy layout of supply chain.The innovation points of the thesis include: (1) The effect of supply chain partnership on competitive advantage was objectively reflected by quantifing "partnership quality". (2) The middling variable supply chain integration was included and had made up for the blank spot of the field. (3) The mechanism of the effect of supply chain partnership...