Management Control of Global Supply Chains

Book excerpt: Within global and rapidly changing environments, cooperation and networking offer possibilities for sharing costs and risks, as well as keeping up with constantly renewed information from outside the firms' boundaries. In line with this, an effective management control of supply chain processes seems to be relevant to compete against other supply chains and to get the required information. In this context, an implementation of a management control institution for inter-firm relations, like a supply chain management control (SCMC), that provides relevant qualitative and quantitative data to manage supply chains reflects an important issue. However, a comprehensive approach with regard to the management control of the entire supply chain and how it can be fulfilled has received scant attention in prior research. The aim of this thesis is therefore to analyze management control systems in global supply chains by means of a mixed methods design with special regard to functional, institutional and instrumental issues. In this context, qualitative data are combined with theoretical insights to develop an empirical model which is tested by means of a quantitative study. Following this, insights into management control aspects, organization of the supply chain management control, management control mechanisms, and the integration of suppliers are provided.