Managing inventories in global sourcing contexts: A contingency perspective

One of the key problems of global supply chains is how to keep inventories low. Even if there is an evidence that supply chain management tools can help in this direction, an under-investigated point is how companies in different contexts experience the effects of global sourcing and the outcomes on their material inventory level. Based on a model proposed by (Golini and Kalchschmidt, 2011, Int. J. Prod. Econ. 133 (1), 86-94.) the aim of this paper is to verify whether different companies - in terms of contingency variables - experience different impacts of globalisation and supply chain management on the material inventory level. In this work, several contingency variables were selected from the literature i.e., company size, product complexity, type of production, type of purchases, number of suppliers and number of suppliers per item. The results show that when considering groups of companies characterised by different contingent variables, the relationship between globalisation, supply chain investments and material inventory levels is valid only for some groups, whereas it loses its significance for others.