Accounts Payable (AP) Automation promises significant cost reductions for an adopting firm by automating many manual and repetitive tasks. However, AP automation may also enhance supplier satisfaction by enabling faster payments, greater transparency, and more consistent communication, ultimately contributing to stronger buyer-supplier relationships (BSRs). The literature lacks a rigorous assessment of the claimed benefits of this technology for adopters and for their suppliers. Using financial data from 135 publicly listed U.S. companies and employing a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach, this study quantifies the effects of AP automation on both technology adopters and suppliers for which they are a major customer. The results show improved liquidity and decreasing Days Payable Outstanding (DPO) for adopters in comparison to otherwise similar firms. These effects are moderated by industry characteristics. However, there is no consistent evidence of cost reduction or improved profitability. Suppliers of adopting firms benefit from a decline in doubtful receivables and reduced reliance on short-term debt, suggesting reduced uncertainty from the buyers and potential enhancement in supplier satisfaction. These benefits are moderated by the degree of buyer-supplier interdependence. While providing evidence of working capital efficiencies for AP automation adopters, our findings also highlight AP automation’s relational value in enhancing supplier satisfaction through prompter payments, improved operational execution, and reduced uncertainty.
This study introduces the concept of buyer-supplier resilience fit—the degree of alignment between a buyer's and its key supplier's supply chain resilience—and examines its effect on buyer financial performance. Grounded in strategic fit theory, buyer-supplier resilience fit is conceptualized as a dyadic alignment mechanism whose performance value depends on commensurate resilience levels across interdependent partners. The hypotheses are tested using survey data collected from multiple senior managers across 160 buyer-supplier dyads. After calculating the resilience fit, the analysis applies data scaling and logarithmic transformations and uses seven machine-learning regression models to compare alternative specifications before estimating the final ordinary least squares model. The results show that buyer-supplier resilience fit is positively associated with buyer financial performance. The moderating effect of buyer relational capability on this relationship is negative and marginal, whereas that of buyer product complexity is not statistically significant. Our study extends prior research by examining resilience from both buyer and supplier perspectives and introducing the concept of buyer-supplier resilience fit.
This study examines how firms balance supply chain resilience and working capital management by integrating operational and financial perspectives. While the relationship between financial flows and resilience has been increasingly recognised, cross-functional tensions between finance and operations remain underexplored. We draw on two focus group sessions conducted in 2022 and 2024, involving 29 managers from diverse industries and firm sizes, and apply the Gioia method for inductive analysis. The findings show that cross-functional alignment between purchasing, supply chain, and finance is a critical antecedent of coherent resilience and working capital practices. When alignment is weak, firms implement conflicting practices that undermine both liquidity and resilience. When alignment is strong, perceived asymmetries in power and trust in partners’ resilience shape prioritisation of resilience and working capital. Firms with favourable power positions tend to shift working capital burdens to supply chain partners, whereas firms facing unfavourable power conditions prioritise resilience. When perceived power is unfavourable and trust is low, adaptation measures are prioritised over more common persistence measures. We further show that improvements in internal financial processes, most notably order-to-cash and purchase-to-pay, can enhance both resilience and working capital performance. The study contributes to supply chain resilience literature by foregrounding the role of finance and resilience for purchasing and supply managers to align with financial colleagues, and by reframing the resilience–working capital interface as an organisational coordination problem rather than an optimisation trade-off.
Organisations often struggle to move purchasing and supply management (PSM) beyond a transactional role to a function with recognised strategic standing. This article examines how PSM develops and becomes accepted and embedded within a complex organisation over time. We integrate institutional theory with a processual perspective and study a five-year longitudinal case in the pharmaceutical industry, drawing on interviews and an extensive document corpus and analysing the material abductively. Our analysis traces three phases. In the first, senior authorisation grants a formal mandate, but structural roll-out stalls because PSM's savings and compliance claims lack alignment with core organisational values. In the second, contestation deepens as functional departments reproduce delegitimising narratives, while procurement protects footholds through relationship-led work. In the third, a strategic reframing of efficiency as innovation funding opens space for hybrid arrangements in which routines, roles and interfaces become part of everyday work in selected domains. We theorise selective institutionalisation as a processual outcome of PSM development in pluralistic organisations. This outcome is produced through a legitimacy sequence in which moral alignment enables pragmatic demonstration and cognitive routinisation, and through three hybridisation mechanisms: reframing, selective standardisation and relational embedding. Rather than treating uneven embedding as incomplete progress, we show how PSM can gain strategic standing through deep involvement in domains where interdependence, feasible value levers and senior salience align, while accepting lighter coupling elsewhere. The study reframes PSM success as the acceptance-building and meaning-making through which strategic standing is earned and sustained, rather than as spend coverage or structural elevation alone.
