Collaborative Planning Forecasting Replenishment (CPFR);Successful Implementation Attributes

This dissertation paper offers a theoretical and empirical explanation for why interfirm collaborations form yet fail, and further suggests how firms might manage them for a more positive outcome. The main focus of this dissertation was to research and investigate the implementation issues in the early stages of CPFR. The crux of the argument is that firms enter into collaborative relationships because these are expected to yield superior results relative to alternate organizational forms in certain situations, offering potentially synergistic combinations of complementary resources and capabilities, yet such relationships are frequently prone to failure. Since CPFR implementations are a recent phenomena and its literature base is extreme thin, a triangulation research method is employed. First, an exhaustive literature review was performed on academic and practitioner research to provide a foundation of the understanding of supply chain management (SCM) and CPFR systems and implementations. Second, four case studies of firms that attempted CPFR implementations were closely examined. Case study research offers many benefits including the ability to observe causality, combine evidence and logic to build, develop or support theory that is not available using other research methods (Maffei and Meredith, 1995). Third, a focus group of CPFR implementation experts was convened to strengthen the research design. Qualitative procedures such as focus groups enable the researcher to get in tune with the respondent and discover how that person sees reality. These insights can be used to develop more efficient follow up quantitative procedures such as mail out surveys (Krueger, 1994). The research triangulation was used to develop hypotheses based on the qualitative data. A survey instrument was developed to test the validity of the hypotheses on practicing managers and consulting professionals. The instrument development procedure satisfies all the requirements for reliability and validity. In analyzing the results of th