Impact of Customer-Supplier Relationship Change on Engineering Organizations (A Systems Approach)

Abstract

This research paper studies the customer - supplier relationship change from an "in-house" to an "open market" relationship in the context of the customer's merger with another organization. All the researched engineering organizations operate on the Telecommunications market. This complex environment is analyzed using the Soft System Methodology and results in a system model containing the most relevant functions for the change situation. Besides the theoretical model the paper concludes with recommendations for managing similar situations which can be used by practitioners as best practices.