Extracting value from the negotiation process with supply chain manufacturers and suppliers.

摘要

The purpose of this research was to measure whether or not executives who decided to invest company assets in the process of negotiating contracts were realizing any return on the those assets. Executives who were entrusted to manage the operations of the company were expected by their Board of Directors, to do so with a discipline that supported increasing revenues to the company year over year. Unfortunately, there was no method or design within the companies sampled, which indicated any strategy to determine if entering into contract negotiations with existing business partners or new partnerships was of any value. As a matter of course, companies often engaged in protracted negotiations with little to show and less support that the final contract would significantly mitigate risk for the parties involved in the negotiations. The researcher focused upon a sampling of publicly traded companies within two key business sectors: General Warehouse and Storage, Construction Machinery and Manufacturing. The researcher assumed that these two groups had a long history of developing and managing partnerships within the supply chain manufacturer and supplier design. The researcher determined that there was significant opportunity for executive management to expect more from the process of contract negotiation. The literature on the subject of negotiation and contracts was rich in testing for the various strategies used by negotiators, identifying behaviors, which counter parties could leverage, emulate, or build a strategy around, and recognizing what executives should expect from the attorneys who developed and prosecuted contracts; however, little discussed what they could or should expect in return. The results of this dissertation intended to act as an encouragement to leaders of companies to assign a greater value to the process of negotiation as an additional avenue to guard the shareholder value of the company through the deployment of a more sensible and measured response to the process of negotiating contracts between supply chain manufacturers and suppliers.