The reasons for strategic cooperation between enterprises should be sought in the dynamically changing macroeconomic environment. Currently, few companies are able to cope with the competitive environment on their own, especially in the international dimension.
Therefore, macroeconomic conditions, as well as the increasingly postulated concepts of sustainable transport development (“green” logistics), force enterprises to enter into partnership cooperative alliances. In modern economies, they have become one of the most important organizational forms, as well as one of the main ways of implementing a company’s business strategy and achieving or maintaining a competitive advantage in a dynamic economic environment.
The main reasons for entering into cooperative relationships include: the possibility of reducing economic risk, achieving economies of scale or scope, overcoming (bypassing) legal barriers, the possibility of increasing one’s own competitiveness (or weakening the competitive position of rivals), the possibility of facilitating and streamlining market expansion, the exchange of technology between partners, and the possibility of combining various logistics functions performed by companies entering into a cooperative relationship in order to improve or expand the value chain. The pro-ecological aspect of cooperation is also significant here, as a consequence of the necessity, increasingly raised by recipients of transport and forwarding services, for organizers and providers of these services to comply with the increasingly restrictive environmental standards in force (for example, EURO standards).
Due to the strategic nature of the decision to enter into a cooperative relationship, choosing this direction is fraught with high risk for a company. This is due to the experience of many entities whose practical experience in this field does not inspire optimism. Practice shows that more than half of the alliances formed end in failure. The most important reasons translating into the failure of cooperative relationships include a lack of: strategic fit of partners in terms of complementary logistics resources, organizational fit in terms of organizational culture and decision-making processes and systems, mutual trust between partners, adaptive inter-organizational exchange processes, sufficient experience of the company in forming and managing cooperative relationships, the choice of an inappropriate alliance management structure (form), as well as the inability to manage conflicts. In management sciences, attempts are also being made to identify the reasons for the success of established cooperation. When measuring them, the time horizon for which the alliance is concluded and the assessment of the relationship in the cooperation, made by each party to the agreement, are generally taken into account.
In each of the two research directions mentioned above, the attention of researchers is focused mainly on the essential features of the agreement itself and on the mutual “compatibility” of the entities forming the relationship or, more generally, on the relationships occurring between these entities. Increasingly, questions about the desired features of an alliance or the proper mutual fit of companies are being replaced by another question, namely: what causes some companies to succeed in partnership relations and others not? An attempt to answer such a question translates into shifting the weight of considerations to an emphasis in research where the problem of a company’s ability to create “appropriate” cooperative relationships and the ability to manage them effectively has come to the fore.
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Source: Czasopismo Logistyka 6/2012