Organizational Buying: Supplier Evaluation Criteria for Standard Products

Of late Organizational buying process has emerged as one of the most important fields of study in Marketing since the organizations are the single most important segment of buyers. Since the quantum of organizational buying is huge and varied, naturally the buying process is highly complex and calls for making crucial purchase decisions. Purchasing functionaries at different levels, with a delegated authority, evaluate the suppliers and are instrumental in the ultimate choice of the organization. Since no study was done in India about the choice criteria being employed by the purchasing executives for evaluating suppliers, a two-fold study was undertaken by the authors recently in this field. The supplier evaluation criteria was examined for two different categories of products, namely standard and special products. The present paper deals with the findings on the standard products. The basic objective of the study was to understand the relative importance of various supplier attributes as perceived by purchase executives in India. The second objective of the study was to find out whether there were any significant differences in the perceived importance of supplier attributes when the evaluation was done by top purchasing executives as compared to other levels of purchasing personnel. The findings could help in evolving marketing strategies compatible with the different levels in the purchasing hierarchy if such differences in perceptions are found to exist.