Using supply chain management to leverage a firm's market orientation

Building supplier relationships and becoming more market oriented have similar building blocks and have similar effects. Strong supplier relationships tend to impact the firm's performance, in part, because the firm can respond to customer needs in a more timely fashion. Supplier relationships tend to be stronger in firms where there is cross-functional sharing of supplier and customer information. Market orientation is an organizational culture that focuses the company on generating market information, cross-functionally sharing that market information, and rapidly responding to that market information to positively impact the performance of the firm. This study explored whether the positive effects of strong supplier relationships are enhanced in market-oriented firms, Results support the notion that supplier relationships are one way of leveraging a firm's market orientation through improved customer responsiveness. Cross-functional sharing of information appears to be the link that ties market orientation and stronger supplier relationships together. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.