Abstract:

Supply chain management concepts largely rely on cooperation. Therefore the economic success of companies within supply chain cooperations depends on the ability and capacity of these companies to build up and nourish cooperation relations. This capacity with its ‘social factor inputs’ as e.g. trust, experience and motivation can be modelled as a destinctive production factor as it is scalable and relevant for the production output as well as economic value indicators respectively. The described research concept tries to identify this interdependance between social factors and production output in supply chains with a case study research as well as a data envelopment analysis. The results show that supply chains seek a diversity of social competencies and social factor levels in order to optimize their overall economic success. Given this fact, there is on the other hand no evidence, that supply chains require a minimum level of social competences. Next to this, the research brought up the assumption, that it is more difficult for international supply chains to use social factors as an input due to their specific conditions. If this is to be true, advantages of global supply chains would have to be reconsidered.