Exploring supplier integration implementation within the humanitarian supply chain context

This thesis aims at exploring the supplier relationship between an international humanitarian organisation and their supplier and supplier integration within the humanitarian context. Supplier integration studies from the humanitarian perspective remain under-explored, although integration has been considered as supply chain management excellence in the business studies. Due to very little research regarding humanitarian supplier integration, an exploratory study was employed in an early phase of the project by conducting expert interviews, in order to validate the significance of the research topic, refine research questions and inform the research direction. This small-scale exploratory study provided useful guideline for the main case study and suggested theoretical lenses and many influencing factors surrounding the relationships between an IHO and its supplier. The research sought a qualitative and abductive approach based on the critical realism principles. It adopted a single case study research design with 8 nested sub-cases under a focal organisation. For data collection methods, semi-structured interviews and documentation were used and data analysis was conducted based on an iterative way between the data and theory through three rounds of data analysis. The findings are divided into two chapters. The first chapter concerns descriptive findings focusing on contextual factors and situational factors. This part provides justification of scoping suppliers from the humanitarian perspective, adaptable working structure of the IHO according to the type of suppliers, and detailed description about donors' influences, regional contexts and disaster types. The second chapter of findings presents the influences of the theoretical elements that were obtained through a further review and the pattern of SI practices according to each supplier.