Högskolan i Skövde

Barley & Kunda (1992) state that the development of managerial discourse is best understood as the result of different dominating ideologies. The argument is that the managerial discourse has developed in waves that have alternated between rational and normative rhetoric. According to the ideology of rational control the manager should manage on basis of expertise. Centralised ecision-making and specialization are therefore desirable. In the ideology of normative control influencing the subordinate's attitudes, satisfaction and beliefs are given preference. The manager should be a leader who sets the goals, which the subordinates are responsible for reaching. During the period 1955 - 1980 the ideology that dominated management was rational control and from 1980 management has been dominated by an ideology of normative control. As management control is a management activity, it is assumable that management control discourse would develop in a similar way. This pilot study shows a change from rhetoric of rationalism to normative rhetoric. Furthermore, as management control is based on rational assumptions, the concept have rhetorically been broadened to include organization culture and HRM, perhaps as a means "to survive" in a dominating managerial ideology of normative control

IT-projects could be small including the implementation of one single unit of e.g. an Enterprise Recourse Planning system (ERP system) of a SME. It could also be huge including several modules, implementation in different countries as well as the process of developing new modules on the request of the buying company. In this case an implementation project in a Swedish manufacturing firm has been studied. The manufacturing company is a global company, and its sales companies in Europe are in focus in this study. The supplier is a Swedish ERP-supplier, with businesses in all continents around the world. 

How does the studied project differ from other IT-projects? The main answer is the collaboration between the two firms in the development process of a completely new module to the ERP system of the supplier. This module has nowadays become a standard module in the supplier’s ERP system. The project has engaged nearly 1,000 people from both the firms. It started in 1995 and ended officially fall 2001.

The aim of the paper is to create an understanding of the development of cooperative interorganisational relations during a projects’ lifetime. More specifically, the centre of attention is on how relations between actors are being developed and changed over time in an IT-project.

Interviews have been carried out with people from the ERP-supplier as well as its customer, altogether around 60 interviews. The interviewed people are project managers, IS-coordinators, key-users, and daily users of the ERP system. The interviews have focused on the respondents’ picture of the implementation project as well as the development part of the project. 

The theoretical frame of reference focuses on cooperation in inter-organizational relations. Keywords are negotiations of joint expectations of risk and trust through formal bargaining/informal sense making, commitments for future action through legal/psychological contracts, executions of commitments through role-/personal interaction, and assessments in these phases based on equity (‘fair dealing’) or efficiency.

The results show that in the negotiation phase, ‘fair dealing’ has been the evaluation criteria most of the time. However, in the very beginning and in the end of the project, effectiveness has been the evaluation criteria. Commitments have mainly been based on psychological contracts, a condition that was questioned when people of importance left the project due to the disturbance of the project. In the execution phase, the commitments have been carried out mainly through personal interaction. 

Lessons to learn from the project are the importance of written agreements due to misinterpretations of psychological contracts between the two parties. Many misunderstandings would have been avoided; time and money could have been saved, if some kind of written agreements would have been demanded from top management.

This article deals with trust from a supplier’s point of view. Different supplier roles develop differently when examined from views of risk, power, and development and change in the trust relation. In this article trust is viewed as a sensemaking process and is found to have different implications in different supplier roles. Power and risk have different meanings, influenced by the differences in supplier roles. Development in the relation takes place with different presumptions, and has different courses as well as contents in relations between suppliers and buyers. Finally, the development of trust does not happen in a linear way in all types of relations. Instead, it rather happens in a discrete way.

This report discusses industrial districts, with focus on co-operation between firms. Industrial districts mainly consist of SME: s that are spatially concentrated and sectorally specialised. These firms often co-operate, although they are competitors. The economic relations are intertwined with social relations, and co-operation is partly the key success factor to competitive advantage. In this report we analyse co-operation in the industrial furniture districts in Italy and Denmark and compare them with the furniture district in Tibro, Sweden. In Denmark and Italy there is a high degree of co-operation, while the firms in Tibro do not co-operate to any great extent. This study therefore concludes in some recommendations in how to promote co-operation in Tibro. 

Computer simulation, because it can be applied to operational problems that are too difficult to model and solve analytically, is an especially effective tool to help analyse Supply/Demand Chain (S/DC) [1] capacity utilization issues [2]. As part of the ongoing research project daisy [3] has a case study for analysing the benefit of interfacing an Enterprise Resource planning system (ERP) with a system for computer simulation. Connecting simulation tools to systems for ERP in order to import necessary input data to simulate production plans would be a proper way to apply computer simulation tools to this type of problems. Simulating production plans could have different purposes, e.g. minimizing waste of resources or setting accurate delivery dates. Technically the connection between the two systems, i.e. the simulation system and the ERP system, could be made in an uncomplicated manner, for instance using files or network-based solutions. Different purposes will require different response time between the two systems involved and thereby different solutions for the connection. The main question in this study is not the technical connection but rather which data to import and the needed quality of these data in order to analyse capacity utilisation. For those ho have built real life simulation models lack of realistically data is a well-known fact. This is due to obsolete or inaccurate product data in ERP systems.

Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) has become a commonly used tool for the modelling and analysis of logistics. A more novel approach to manufacturing problems is Advanced Planning Systems (APS). These are used in an optimization process for the planning of production, inventory, and transportations often integrated with ERP-systems. Supply/Demand Chains can be approached from a strategic, tactical, or operational level. Simulation tools and APS-systems are different approaches to a similar problem. The simulation approach involves connecting an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system with a simulation system. The simulation system contains a model of the production, and 'real-time'-data is used to produce a realistic production plan, e. g. to minimize waste of resources, or setting more accurate delivery dates. APS-systems are using simultaneous data when considering resource allocation. APS-systems normally use a separate module for calculation and optimization. The optimization activity produces an improved plan where trade-offs are examined. In this paper a conceptual model is proposed and an overview is given on the two software tools, and their advantages and disadvantages. Their usefulness is discussed in the context of physical material flow in Supply Chain (SC). Finally some results and experiences from industrial simulation studies are presented.