The Challenge of Component Purchasing Excellence – a Case Study at Nahoj Nim

Nahoj Nim has for a long time been very successful at developing, producing and selling packaging solutions for the food industry. Today, however, Nahoj Nim faces a new challenge as competitors are gaining market shares. The purchasing unit Component & Technical Consultant Purchasing (hereafter referred to as C&TCP), involved in sourcing, contracting and managing the supplier base for components and technical consultants, have until now had no or little involvement in the product development and production processes. In product development the designers have historically had the liberty to choose components and parts as well as suppliers simply by technology standards. No or little attention has been directed towards the commercial aspects, which has lead to a proliferation of different components used and the supplier base has grown rapidly. As Nahoj Nim faces new challenges, so does C&TCP. In order to be able to support the business with an efficient and structured purchasing of components and technical consultants C&TCP needs to make some changes. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to describe and analyze the purchasing function Component & Technical Consultant Purchasing and to suggest organizational changes in order to achieve purchasing excellence. Methodology: The research has been conducted as a descriptive case-study in order to do an in-depth analysis of the present situation. The qualitative collection of the primary empirical data has mainly been made by numerous interviews, internally at C&TCP as well as externally with key informants at Nahoj Nim in Lund, Sweden, and Modena, Italy. The secondary data has been gathered from written sources; literature, articles and e-sources. Conclusions: The purchasing of components and technical consultants at C&TCP is today merely 25 percent as efficient as the most prominent purchasing organizations world-wide. The department is organizationally placed in contradiction to the responsibility of being a global pur