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The problem explored in this thesis falls under a broad topic of information sharing in a buyer-supplier relationship. Responding to the empirically underexplored state of extant literature on information sharing, this study aims to gain a better understanding of the factors that influence managers to engage in information sharing as an activity, as well as the factors influencing information sharing as an outcome and its consequences in a buyer-supplier relationship. In this way, this study acknowledges a conceptual separation between information sharing as an activity (i.e. a manager’s openness) and information sharing as an outcome (i.e. relationship transparency), and treats a manager as embedded in an external, wider interaction environment (e.g. buyer-supplier relationship). The study adopts a qualitative, exploratory approach, utilising a case-based research strategy. The empirical study is based on a pilot and two main cases. The main interviews were carried out on the suppliers’ side of two buyer-supplier dyads. In total, the empirical work consisted of 45 semi-structured interviews with 32 managers. Based on the empirical work, the thesis develops two models: the contingencies model, which captures the influencing factors of a manager’s openness and relationship transparency, and the consequences model, which captures the consequences of relationship transparency. In so doing, the thesis makes three primary theoretical contributions. First, captured in the contingencies model, it shows that a manager’s openness is influenced by the interplay of a number of individual-level factors, where managers’ trust and risk taking behaviours play a central role as well as through an external interaction environment. Second, the same model suggests that information quality alone is not enough to foster relationship transparency and that other factors, such as trustworthiness of information source and a recipient’s knowledge, should also be considered. Third, the thesis also identifies a number of consequences of relationship transparency, which are captured in the consequences model, and highlights the role of the external context an understanding of those consequences. In this way, the study marks a step forward towards increasing the understanding of information sharing as an activity and as an outcome, while considering an individual manager as part of a wider interaction environment.

Recent developments in operations and supply chain management (eg lean thinking, postponement and agility) offer a diverse range of approaches that provide useful perspectives, but the relationship between them and more traditional views of operations strategy are unclear, or even considered to be in conflict. This research aims to clarify the underlying conceptual relationships in an attempt to develop theoretical understanding.

The scope of research on interorganisational relationship structure has been limited by rigid adherence to specific governance paradigms and by lack of research into relational performance. The conceptual framework developed in this thesis responds to these issues by pursuing a multiparadigm, approach from which it develops a taxonomy of relationship structures that is linked to performance. The classification of a relationship into the taxonomy is based on the relationship strength construct. This construct discriminates between relational governance structures by measuring both behaviour process and economic content elements of a relationship. The result is a taxonomy of four relationship structures. They are bilateral, recurrent, dominant partner and discrete. Furthermore, the research links these relationship structures to a multifaceted definition of relational performance, which includes both behaviour and economic outcomes, to enable it to test which structure optimises performance. It proposes that bilateral relationships, developed from social exchange theory, are the optimal governance structures for managing interfirm. exchanges. Bilateral relationships have the highest level of relationship strength of all the structures. These structures involve partners who have high levels of trust in each other and who have made substantial commitment to the relationship. If these relationships are found to be the optimal structures in terms of performance, considerable support will have been found for social exchange theory. The research hypotheses are supported by empirical work which combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The qualitative study uses in-depth interviews with buyer and supplier organisations. The quantitative study consists of a mail survey of 500 UK industrial buyers who are interviewed about their main supply relationship. The industries included in the research are engineering, electronics and communications. The development of a taxonomy of relationship structures and its links to performance provides guidance to researchers and managers on how to assess and develop the potential of a relationship. The assumptions managers make about relationships have an impact on what is attainable from the relationship. The research also provides strong support for social exchange positions in managing interfirm relationships.

A major task facing a number of different procuring agencies is the assessment of the developmental reliability of a product as contractors incrementally provide information. These agencies would like to use structured quantitative methodologies, as opposed to unstructured assessment currently adopted, to evaluate reliability throughout the life of a development programme as additional information becomes available. Due to resource constraints, any developed methodology must be cost and time efficient. This research attempts to develop a methodology for customers that is capable of assessing the information presented by a contractor in a reliability case to support decision making throughout the procurement process.

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The aim of this thesis is to study one of the classical scheduling objectives that is of minimizing the sum of flow times, in the context of a supply chain network. We consider the situation that a supplier schedules a set of jobs for delivery in batches to several manufacturers, who in tum have to schedule and deliver jobs in batches to several customers. The individual problem from the viewpoint of supplier and manufacturers will be considered separately. The decision problem faced by the supplier is that of minimizing the sum of flow time and delivery cost of a set of jobs to be processed on a single machine for delivery in batches to manufacturers. The problem from the viewpoint of manufacturer is similar to the supplier's problem and the only difference is that the scheduling, batching and delivery decisions made by the supplier define a release date for each job, before which the manufacturer cannot start the processing of that job. Also a combined problem in the light of cooperation between the supplier and manufacturer will be considered. The objective of the combined problem is to find the best scheduling, batching, and delivery decisions that benefit the entire system including the supplier and manufacturer. Structural properties of each problem are investigated and used to devise a branch and bound solution scheme. Computational experience shows significant improvements over existing algorithms and also shows that cooperation between a supplier and a manufacturer reduces the total system cost of up to 12.35%, while theoretically the reduction of up to 20% can be achieved for special cases.

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