HIGH RISK, LOW REWARD. A DEEP DIVE INTO THE PRINTING INDUSTRY : A qualitative study of procurement risk management within Swedish printing corporations

Abstract: Globalization and digitalization are trends that are everlasting affecting the world economy. This has allowed businesses to capitalize on markets that would be impossible to reach, without a physical move, but have also resulted in new obstacles. These two trends are intertwined and come with a multitude of new risks. From the growing complexity of the supply chains to a higher dependency on technology. Risk has become a central theme to consider for businesses, as the supply chain is being subjected to higher vulnerability than ever before. The procurement unit carries a fair share of the responsibility of dealing with risks. This is due to the “rippling effect” that any disturbance within the procurement unit has on the supply chain as a whole.  This study focused on risk management within the procurement unit, where we had a large focus on the perception of risks and risk management for the procurement process. This was then applied to the printing industry, an industry that is being heavily challenged by the digitalization trend. The general characteristics of the industry as well as the history of destructive innovations are both evidence of the great need for risk management within the Swedish printing industry. This created a notion of great applicability within our research area. The theoretical framework acted as a point of departure for developing the correct themes that would extract fruitful data. Our purpose was to examine in what way, and to what extent Swedish printing firms consider risk in their procurement process. Further, we wanted to contribute with theoretical knowledge to the research gap we had discovered, which was the usage of PRM-strategies in a Swedish context.  In our journey to fulfill our purpose we decided to conduct a qualitative study where six printing firms and one member organization were interviewed. The interviews followed a semi-structured form and provided us with insight into the printing industry’s views on risks and the management of these risks. The study heeds an inductive research approach where we gathered material and analysed it, comparing it to pre existing theory. To analyze the gathered material we conducted an inductive thematic analysis where three themes were formed. Based on the results formed by conducting our study, we can conclude that Swedish printing firms do not apply any risk management strategies for their procurement unit. Many firms within our sample felt a disconnect between their work processes for risks and their perceptions of working with risks. Some firms expressed a desire to expand their work processes for risk after conducting the interviews, however, we see few indications of future procurement risk management applications.    Despite these views on procurement risk management, we managed to identify several risk mitigating tactics being applied with Swedish printing firms without them expressing any strategies. We believe that this stems from the industry’s maturity as well as the power differences existing between suppliers and industry firms. These conclusions do, however, require support from future research and we encourage future research to investigate the application of PRM-strategies within the printing industry further. Finally, we presented a model conveying a general action plan to be applied by industry firms. This action plan is rudimentary and its purpose is simply to provide firms with a risk management structure to follow and build upon with firm specific preconditions. We hope that this model can aid firms in realizing the importance of risk management and provoke them to spend more time and energy on it.