Supply chain collaboration – from dyads to triads

Collaborations in supply chain are regarded as activities of value-adding partnership construction in achieving competitive advantages. The dyadic collaboration is the starting mode in value creation encourages individual parties to pool their resource and information to improve supply chain performance. However, due to the increasing complexity within a supply chain and the rise in outsourcing, the supply landscape is now more relying on networks. A triadic view on supply chain collaboration is regarded as the first step in exploring firm’s relational behaviours of collaboration in network perspective, which is significant to the development of supply chain management. This research aims to explore the configuration patterns of triadic collaborations in supply chain. To fill the gaps in literature review, this research defined three research questions (What are the patterns of supply chain collaboration with a triadic view? How do dyads come together into triads in supply chain collaboration? How do triadic collaborations impact on supply chain performance?). This research aims to investigate supply chain collaboration but with a triadic perspective, rather than a traditional dyadic perspective. The main purpose of this research is to identify the configuration patterns of collaboration triads in supply chain, and to identify its impacts on supply chain performance. It is an exploratory research, and the methodology has been applied is multiple case studies. In regarding the industry background (pharmaceutical industry), firm size (small-to-medium sized enterprise, SME) and region (China mainland), case companies are selected to be involved. Techniques of pattern matching, explanation building, logic models, and cross-case synthesis have been applied to generate high quality data analysis. This research makes contribution to knowledge on multiple aspects. It enables relevant stakeholders (business practitioners and academia) to better understand supply chain collaboration, which also can help to guide them how to collaborate in achieving more benefits