While many senior executives continue to talk about the "voice of the customer," few demonstrate their commitment to this concept by spending time with customers. Many continue to use their intuition or `golden gut' in their attempt to provide superior customer value. Unfortunately, `senior executive intuition' is rarely attuned to the needs of their customers. While the competitive environment continues to intensify, executives have cut back on the time devoted to customers just when it should be increasing. This article discusses the need for senior executives to spend time with customers and provides examples of the benefits that this approach will provide.

This paper aims at to create a general framework for vendor-related issues in the context of supply chains, and the status of vendor selection decisions in particular, how to relate uncertainty factors in vendor selection decisions, and the role of suppliers in buyer-supplier relationships in the Indian manufacturing firms. Statistical analysis, such as factor analysis is used to identify those `successful factors' that contribute positively to vendor selection decisions and buyer-supplier relationships. Four important sectorsautomotive; engineering; electrical and electronics; and FMCGare targeted for questionnaire administration. Cronbach's coefficient (alpha, a) is calculated to test the reliability and internal consistency of the responses. The survey results indicate the percentage of suppliers in Indian manufacturing firms, percentage of the purpose of involvement of suppliers in the Indian manufacturing firms, and ranking of the vendor selection criteria. Two sets of hypotheses have been formulated, which are concerned with the vendor selection decisions and buyer-supplier relationships issues in the supply chains of the Indian manufacturing firms. The multiple linear regression analysis is carried out to test these hypotheses. The research indicates that the various uncertainty issues related to the criteria of vendor selection, have a significant impact on decisions. It also indicates that the supplier has a greater role in the buyer-supplier relationships.

This paper presents the results of a questionnaire-based survey of the Indian manufacturing firms. This survey has two main objectives: (i) to examine the current practices of the vendor related issues in the Indian manufacturing firms and (ii) to test the validity of some hypotheses, which have been formulated for vendor related issues in the context of supply chains. This is followed by the description of methodology adopted to achieve the survey-oriented research objectives. Subsequent to this, observations from the survey are reported and discussed. Various other aspects of the survey such as questionnaire development, its administration, validity and descriptive statistics are also discussed in this paper.

An Empirical Study of Vendor Selection Decisions and Buyer-Supplier Relationships in Indian Firms, framework, supply chains, vendor selection decisions, Indian manufacturing firms, multiple linear regression analysis, administration, internal consistency.