Building partnerships with suppliers as a new trend in management

The main objective of the paper is to show the importance of building partnerships with suppliers, and to present the results of research verifying the following hypothesis: Most of the furniture industry companies in Lower Silesia take into account the partnership relations with suppliers in their formulated business strategy. The study was carried out using CATI method and included a research sample consisting of 110 enterprises of Lower Silesia. Enterprises were selected using the purposive sampling method. Selection of companies was based on factors such as: regional differences, basic products and the activity period, size organizational and legal form, basic profile of activity. Interviews with companies’ managers were based on an anonymous survey questionnaire. A time frame of research included 2 phases: phase I – exploratory phase: February – May 2013 and phase II – the essential phase: up to early 2014.

The studs has confirmed the formulated hypothesis. Most of the companies of the furniture industry have developed an overall strategy in the form of official or unofficial documents. They are characterized by a high degree of diversity, both in terms of accepted legal form, number of employees, year of establishment, business profile and range of operation. They see the impact of relationships with suppliers on the modernization of the products in the context of improving their quality. Deepening and ordering problems in the field of building partnerships with suppliers in terms of the overall business strategy formulation may be considered a theoretical contribution of this work. The results of the study should help companies in building partnerships with suppliers appropriately using the proposed roadmap; conducting quantitative and qualitative research, to assess the impact of the company's overall strategy on the relationships with suppliers.