It is clear that there is a strong drive for organisations to adopt the shared service model with the intention to gain some economic benefits. This research also acknowledges the theory on supplier relationship management, as well as relationship quality management and how these two bodies of knowledge are connected to shared service and ultimately how they affect the relationship benefits between buyers and sellers in business to business environments. With the growing importance to distinguish one’s business from others to gain competitive advantage, relationships have become a crucial differentiator. It is important to appreciate whether the shared service model enhances relationships or not. This research therefore sought to examine the relationship quality measure elements such as trust, satisfaction and commitment as well as the relationship benefits; social, psychological and functional which are impacted by the introduction of a shared service. The research findings offer some important insights into how the introduction of a shared service model into an organisational structure impacts these relationship benefits. When comparing a shared service structure to that of a decentralised model it was evident that all elements of relationship quality and benefits changed. The results indicated that once the shared service became the central point of contact and communication for many of the suppliers, relationship quality and relationship benefits declined. Further, the results found were that many of the anticipated benefits of shared service were also not seen or experienced by the suppliers. This research involved two phases, a qualitative phase component and a quantitative phase. The qualitative phase involved face-to-face interviews with five significant suppliers to Sasol, companies in industries such as Civil, Manufacturing as well as industrial goods suppliers. The quantitative phase involved an electronic survey, distributed to all of Sasol’s suppliers. The data gathered from these interviews and surveys, together with the reviewed literature helped to measure the affects of shared service on supplier relationships. One hundred and forty questionnaires were processed and data was subjected to a variety of statistical analysis. This research will add to the limited knowledge of shared service as well as equip managers implementing shared service with some strategic insights. When implementing shared service it is imperative to look beyond mere cost savings and to also consider the relationship affects for all concerned when changing the relationship dynamics. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / ccgibs2014 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur småföretag inom mediebranschen använder sig av sociala medier för att stärka sina relationer, sitt eget varumärke på företagsmarknaden och hur en bakomliggande strategi för detta är utformad. Uppsatsen är utformad efter en kvalitativ branschstudie. Ansatsen grundar sig i en deduktion med inslag av induktion. Studiens empiriska data utgörs av åtta semistrukturerade intervjuer med personer inom mediebranschen. Studiens resultat visar att sociala medier öppnar upp för enkelhet, transparens och humor genom att visa upp personerna bakom varumärket. Detta bidrar till ett mer trovärdigt och personligt varumärke på företagsmarknaden. Sociala medier spelar en stor roll i den totala marknadskommunikation, däremot kan det inte ersätta den fysiska interaktionen. Resultatet visar att småföretag inom mediebranschen använder sig av sociala medier inom ramen för en icke uttalad strategi men som vi anser är att definiera som en strategi då ett likartat mönster visat sig. Ett mönster som påvisar att varumärkesbyggande sker genom referensmarknadsföring som möjliggörs lättare genom sociala medier. Därför bör sociala medier och referensmarknadsföring användas som en medveten strategi för att stärka varumärken och relationer på företagsmarknaden.

With widespread use of the Internet, data is often shared between organizations in B2B health care networks. Integrating data across all sources in a health care network would be useful to public health surveillance and provide a complete view of how the overall network is performing. Because of the lack of standardization for a common data model across organizations, matching identities between different locations in order to link and aggregate records is difficult. Moreover, privacy legislation controls the use of personal information, and health care data is very sensitive in nature so the protection of data privacy and prevention of personal health information leaks is more important than ever. Throughout the process of integrating data sets from different organizations, consent (explicitly or implicitly) and/or permission to use must be in place, data sets must be de-identified, and identity must be protected. Furthermore, one must ensure that combining data sets from different data sources into a single consolidated data set does not create data that may be potentially re-identified even when only summary data records are created. In this thesis, we propose new privacy preserving data integration protocols for public health surveillance, identify a set of privacy preserving data integration patterns, and propose a supporting framework that combines a methodology and architecture with which to implement these protocols in practice. Our work is validated with two real world case studies that were developed in partnership with two different public health surveillance organizations.

The Diploma Thesis consists of four chapters. The first one describes B-2-B market and compare its approach to the customers with its approach to the consumers' market. Further this chapter describes the latest trends and specifics of the pharmaceutical field. The second chapter describes the marketing research and its various ways of realization. The following chapter depicts this marketing research in connection with the B-2-B market. The last chapter is the practice part of the thesis. Firstly there are the reasons that led me to realize this research. Then the main goal and the hypothesis are mentioned. The description of the researches course, its main summaries and the methodical edifications are not absent as well.

This thesis presents the issue of the entering of a business to business company on the Unated Arab Emirates market. Its objective is to develop an appropriate marketing strategy and apply it to Haubi's Ges. M.b.H, a leading Austrian bakery. The strategy was elaborated from the analysis of the food market both at the global and national level in the UAE. Assumptions underlying the success of a company in this market are included in the SWOT analysis. The principles derivated from this analysis are then applied to market segmenting and concurrence monitoring. The final strategy consists of a specific marketing mix, which was determined by the analysis of the obtained results and fully respects the particular cultural environment of the UAE.

In the past decade, there has been a transformation in how businesses are done, many business chose to adopt digitization and others were forced to go with the flow. As a part of this digital revolution, social media has reserved a big share of this transformation in how companies do their marketing and communicate their product and brand image to their customers. Social media in a business to customer context has been very common since the birth of social media, companies had realized its benefit, and however, it is still in an early phase in a business to business context. Social media has become an effective marketing tool for B2B companies, yet, there are still drawbacks when companies fail to know how to use such platforms to their benefit and merely have a shy presence or do not have a well-defined strategy to the use of social media in the most effective way. A vital step when incorporating social media in marketing is to create a clear goals and metrics. However, it has been seen that many companies lack the expertise, resources and the know-how, to implement a social media marketing strategy. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the practices of B2B companies when they use social media without a clearly defined social media marketing strategy, what they do when they use social media.

The digital landscape is rapidly changing and provides business-to-business companies with new digital tools and channels to conduct their marketing work e.g. social media networks. Business-to-consumer firms have been previously research in the topic of social media and digital marketing. However, there is a lack of research in the business-to-business area (Elsevier, 2016). This bachelor thesis aim to contribute to the field of marketing when it comes to social media and digital marketing activities in business-to-business companies. This through examine and describe how marketing practitioners e.g. marketing managers; experience and think about social media adoption and usage for digital marketing purposes. Two research questions are presented in the report; (i) how is social media adopted and used in digital marketing within international business-to-business companies, and for what purpose, according to marketing managers? and (ii) how can social media adoption and usage be improved for marketing purposes in international business-to-business companies, according to marketing managers? To answer the RQs the paper took a qualitative approach through conducting semi-structured interviews with eight Swedish business professionals whom work with social media for marketing purposes. The research concluded that social media is adopted either due to the assumption that B2B firms simply should, or the reckon of its low cost of usage, viral reach, ease of usage and accessibility. The usage itself were conduct marketing activities e.g. market business offerings; but also, to promote the business itself and its accomplishments. Regarding improvements, marketers’ states that digital marketing through social media needs to be further integrated in the overall business and marketing strategy. They also suggest management to provide training and/or education for the employees to increase the efficiency of the usage.

This thesis focuses on one key theme, which is to understand the construct of organizational networking behaviors in business-to-business markets. It is concerned with two main issues, which are built into the research program of three empirical studies. The first issue is concerned with a systematic understanding of organizational behaviors in response to the embeddedness and interconnectedness of the network of business relationships that every organization has to deal with. Study 1 of the research program explores the concept termed ‘organizational networking behaviors’. This study adopts an industrial network approach, the central tenet of which is that firms undertake a continuous process of interaction with their important partners in the embedding context of the business network. A multi-informant approach, using semi-structured interviews, was used to collect qualitative data from thirty-one executive managers (in fifteen manufacturing firms in the UK). This study identified information acquisition, opportunity enabling, strong-tie resource mobilization and weak-tie resource mobilization as four types of organizational networking behaviors, which are reflected by their respective sub-types. The resulting conceptualization of organizational networking forms the basis for the operationalization of the construct in Study 2. While Study 1 takes an exploratory qualitative approach, Study 2 deploys a confirmatory quantitative approach since it is necessary to confirm/refute the resulting conceptualization and its types from Study 1. A rigorous scale construction and validation process was followed in this study. The conceptualization of the measurement model was carefully considered based on its theoretical underpinning. A second-order formative measurement structure was conceptualized, which required the employment of a multiple indicators and multiple causes (MIMIC) model for the validation of such a measurement model. A dataset of 603 responses was collected and analyzed to confirm the structure of the four types of organizational networking behaviors, which is in line with the results of Study 1.The second issue that the thesis is concerned with is the influences of such organizational networking efforts, which are examined from a firm’s behavioral perspective. Study 3 examines how organizational networking behaviors serve as the driver of a firm’s customer-oriented, competitor-oriented and relationship-oriented behaviors due to the sensing and seizing aspects of networking. It was also hypothesized that a firm’s customer-oriented, competitor-oriented and relationship-oriented behaviors positively affect firm performance. The test of these hypotheses required survey data collection, which was done through an on-line questionnaire. A dataset of 354 responses was collected from UK managers, whose organizations operate in business-to-business markets in either the manufacturing or services sectors. The use of statistical modeling techniques is similar to that of Study 2. The research results indicate that a firm’s network-oriented behaviors positively impact on the development of customer-oriented and competitor-oriented behaviors. They also foster relationship coordination with its important business partners within the network. In addition, the effective management of the firm’s portfolio of relationships is found to mediate the positive impact of network-oriented behaviors on firm profitability.

As a subject of this Masters thesis, I have chosed Customer Relationship Managemement in the aerospace industry, thus the aplication of set of tools supporting marketing, sales and customer service. The work is a gradual description of current trands and changes in the aviation industry with aim to follow moments of truth and the processes that take place at customer level Business to Cusotmer (B2C) and at industrial level Business to Business (B2B). While the B2C sector is represented by relatioship of air cariers and passengers, the B2B sector follows the relationship of air carriers and airports. The work is divided into two main parts, theoretical and practical one. The theoretical part consists of a destription of the CRM and aviation industry. It is based on the knowledge that the customer relationship strategy is a long-term and effecite partnership based on understanding of specific customer wishes and needs, which is supported by IT technologies and propper alignment of business processes. The practical part was written in order to apply CRM approaches to right customers (using an appropriate market segmentation) at right place (by creating positive moments of truth) and through right processes.

This dissertation examines the relative importance of country of manufacturing and country-of-brand versus the functional attributes for industrial products. The study examines country of origin, country-of-brand origin, and how they affect the purchasing team, or what is referred to in this study as the decision-making unit, when purchasing commercial refrigeration compressors. The literature reveals that the international marketing community has been looking at the country-of-origin and what effect it has on the purchasing decision-making process. Even though the world seems to be becoming smaller, purchasing people may still be valuing the country or brand effect before making final purchasing decisions. A conjoint analysis experiment was performed with a group of people who have purchased commercial refrigeration compressors in the past 5 years. The QuestionPro web page was used to collect the data from global users, where they were asked to rank the 36 conjoint analysis cards and a questionnaire which was to determine the respondents' demographic characteristics.