A Study on the Factors Influencing the Relationship between Suppliers and Manufacturers in the Process of New Product Development: with a Focus on CEO's Characteristics and Performance
It seems most important for a manufacturing company to be well aware of its relationship with suppliers. This is why it is essential to analyze and control the structural relationship among CEO's characteristics, relations between suppliers and manufacturers and new product development performances affected by such relations. The present study may be summed up as follows: First, from the analysis of characteristics of manufacturing company's CEO and relations between suppliers and manufacturers, it could be verified that CEO's characteristics exercised influence upon sharing of product development process and upon cooperation for technical manpower, but not upon sharing of core technologies, signifying the fact that nothing could be more important than the role of CEO who has strong will to improve his or her relations with suppliers; and Second, from the analysis of relations between suppliers and manufacturers as well as relations between management and new product development performances, it became evident that both management performance and product development performance were affected by sharing of product development process. It was also known that cooperation for technical development process had influence upon the product development performance but not upon the management performance. Furthermore, the analysis showed that both management performance as well as product development performance were affected by sharing of core technologies.