Guideline for the Development of Chinese Suppliers: Improving the Buyer Supplier Relationship Using the Balanced Scorecard

Revision with unchanged content. For engineering goods the bought-in part costs represent a big share of the overall production costs. Facing increasing global competition, many German en­gineering companies identify low-cost sourcing from China as one of the re­maining levers to reduce costs. But shifting purchasing volume to China re­quires in general the development and improvement of new suppliers. In or­der to do so, what methods do exist? How do they match the specialties in Ger­man buyer Chinese supplier relationships? And, what can be done to boost the results? Based on the state of the art in literature and in concerned com­panies, the author Matthias Vodička analyzes the current approaches and illus­trates their strengths and weaknesses regarding their use in China. An adap­ted Balanced Scorecard is designed, which, including the identified dri­vers of success, aims for the improvement of the buyer supplier relationship it­self. With this, a strategic guideline and an action plan can boost the out­comes for both parties. This work addresses companies which are (or plan to get) involved in China sourcing activities and those, who are generally in­te­res­ted in the issues occurring for Western companies in China.