The turbulent rate of environmental change
and the concomitant growth of globalization of organizations have contributed
to the growth of the global account management (GAM) form of organizing
a firm’s supply chain. GAM is a structural alternative for providing worldwide
exclusive mutual interdependence between the supplier and customer organizations.
This high customer-supplier interdependence is intended to create on a
global scale a connected set of assets (i.e., value chain) between the
organizations, which is difficult to be replicated by competitors. The
achievement of such an interconnected relationship, while creating considerable
competitive advantage, however, also dramatically increases managerial
role ambiguity in the organization supplying the global customer.
The role of a global account supply manager
is to build critical linkages for the firm with the globally dispersed
customer’s units, while simultaneously managing the internal functional
and cross-functional relationships within the supplying firm. The perceived
value of GAM teams are envisioned as a: 1) single/uniform point of contact
and coordination for global customers, 2) means to improve communications
between supplier and customer on a global scale, 3) means to insure that
there is consistency in products, terms of trade and uniformity of pricing
practices, 4) means to insure that service is provided to global customers
in each market in which they are active, 5) means to coordinate and increase
utilization of marketing resources/programs globally (i.e., use of successful
marketing programs across markets/regions), and 6) means to monitor/audit
customer profitability to the supplier. The resulting plurality of goals
in the internal and external global account settings greatly complicates
the supplying manager’s task.
There has been a plethora of research on GAM
primarily focused on the structural and relational fit between the global
customer and its supplying organizations. However, the managerial issues
in supplying global account customers and maintaining global account processes
have curiously been neglected in the past research in both global marketing
and management literature.
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