Managing inventories in global sourcing contexts: a contingency perspective

In recent years, companies have paid growing attention to supply chain management at a global level. However, an under investigated point is how companies in different contexts experience the effects of global sourcing and the outcomes from their investments in the supply chain. Based on a model proposed by Golini and Kalchschmidt (2010), the aim of this paper is to verify whether different companies - in terms of contingency variables - experience different impacts of globalization and supply chain management on the material inventory level. In this work several contingency variables were selected according to the literature i.e., size, product complexity, type of production, type of purchases, number of suppliers and number of suppliers per item. Results show that when considering groups of companies characterized by different contingent variables, the relationship between globalization, supply chain investment and material inventory level is valid only for some groups, while for others loses its significance.