Marcus A. Bellamy

OM PhD Candidate, Georgia Institute of Technology

Thursday, July 23rd, from 9:00 to 10:30am in the Scheller College of Business, Room 223.

Area: Operations Management

Committee Members: Dr. Soumen Ghosh (co-chair), Dr. Manpreet Hora (co-chair), Dr. Cheryl Gaimon, Dr. Chris Forman, and Dr. Rahul C. Basole

Title: Leveraging Supply Network Relationships to Drive Performance

Dissertation Overview:

Today’s supply chains can be characterized as a globally distributed set of vertical and horizontal interactions among suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and customers, which have transformed the traditional linear supply chain into a complex supply network of member interactions. Effective supply chain management consequently requires focal firms to develop capabilities to manage a myriad of multi-tier, interconnected relationships often spanning multiple industries. Conventional assessments of supply chain relationships as linear or dyadic structures, rather than as a network, limit academician and managerial approaches to overcome challenges to effectively manage supply chains. Although researchers have made some headway in characterizing a firm’s supply network as a source of innovation and performance, empirical research on innovation and performance implications of supply network structure and its corresponding relationship dynamics is still fairly nascent. My research focuses on leveraging supply network relationships to drive performance. Specifically, my body of work examines how the structural, knowledge, and dependency differences in a firm’s supply network can affect knowledge and information flow, and ultimately the firm’s innovative, operational, and financial performance. 

In my first essay, I examine the influence of supply network structure on firm innovation using multi-source data on supply network partner relationships in the context of the electronics industry. I find that supply network accessibility has a significant association with a firm’s innovation output. I also find that interconnected supply networks strengthen the association between supply network accessibility and innovation output. Moreover, the influence of the two structural characteristics on innovation output can be enhanced by a firm’s absorptive capacity and level of supply network partner innovativeness. In my second essay, I analyze supply chain relationship data from the Bloomberg database using the proportion of the firm’s business that each of its partners is responsible for (in terms of customer cost and supplier revenue) as a proxy for relationship dependence. The primary focus is on the electronics industry. I find that firm performance is influenced by how a firm distributes its cost and revenue streams both upstream (as a customer) and downstream (as a supplier) and that this effect is facilitated by the way that a firm’s supply network is structured. In my third essay, I elaborate in greater detail on the benefits a network analytic lens can provide to understand and manage supply chains under a variety of contexts. I use the network analytic lens to compare supply networks of focal firms in multiple industries, from high velocity and low velocity industry contexts, with emphasis on differences in customer-supplier dependence, supply network structure, and performance. All three papers extend current research findings by bringing a more holistic assessment of firms that are embedded in a supply network, addressing the need for deeper structural analysis.