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The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of relationships and networking in the international flow of seafood products through export processes and practices using empirical case examples.

This paper provides an insight into seafood export through ten case studies of seafood exporters from Norway and a freight forwarder working with most of these companies.

The international seafood business is characterised by coordination, interactions, and exchange such that economic and social interactions among network members transcend national boundaries into international/global markets. The findings reveal how studied seafood exports are in line with the learning-based Uppsala internationalisation model, embedded in international buyer-seller relationship structures and networks, which is also a particularity of this food-producing industry. To secure long-term business in distant markets, small- and medium-sized (SME) seafood exporters have shifted the focus from transactional approaches to relationships and networking as a means of improving export performance. This paper suggests how logistics and marketing have become closely and strategically interconnected, and so marketing strategies depend on logistics strategies and the two cannot be separated in a typical global seafood supply network.

Purposeful collaborative interaction between exporter and importer helps in risk mitigation. Increased interactions in distant markets by SMEs can also be achieved using social media networking.

This paper offers an insight into the global seafood supply network using empirical case examples from Norway, an important seafood producing country.

The purpose of this research is to detect, through applying a process-based view, how to manage economisation of the maintenance and modification operations in offshore petroleum logistics operations.

A single case study of engineering services, more specifically, maintenance and modification service operations, on a Norwegian Sea oil platform reveals the dynamics of building network capabilities in a consistent network structure. Two layers of coordination are studied: the engineering process and its context, represented by its network of interconnected firms. This case study empirically grounds how engineering service involves managing reciprocally interdependent exchange processes in the network structure.

Pooled interdependencies are vital in understanding the nature of service provision and use, and sequential interdependencies are vital in narrating the timing of processes to reveal the nature of process emergence to coordinate strings of production events. Furthermore, the network structure, when characterised by multiple interdependent projects, is also dynamic but at a slower pace.

Through the case study, operations management is revealed to be associated with project emergence at two levels: the core process level regarding daily continuous change, including the changing interaction of multiple different and interdependent projects, and the contextual level, where features of interdependency and integration change, affecting engineering service production. This provides guidance as to the economisation of engineering services. They change not only interactions in the flow of production but also its context.

The purpose of this paper is to question the applicability of recent industry-derived terms such as “Big Data” (BD) and the “Internet of things” (IoT) in a supply chain managerial context. Is this labeling useful in managing the operations found in supply chains?

BD and IoT are critically discussed in the context of a complete supply chain organization. A case study of banana supply from Costa Rica to Norway is provided to empirically ground this research. Thompson’s contingency theory, Alderson’s functionalistic end-to-end “marketing channels” model, Penrose’s view of supply purpose associated with service provision, and particularities of banana supply reveal how end-to-end supply chains are complex systems, even though the product distributed is fairly simple.

Results indicate that the usefulness of BD in supply chain management discourse is limited. Instead its connectivity is facilitated by what is now becoming commonly labeled as IoT, people, devices and documents that are useful when taking an end-to-end supply chain perspective. Connectivity is critical to efficient contemporary supply chain management.

BD and IoT have emerged as a part of contemporary supply chain management discourse. This study directs attention to the importance of scrutinizing emergent and actual discourse in managing supply chains, that it is not irrelevant which words are applied, e.g., in research on information-enabled supply process development. Often the old words of professional terminology may be sufficient or even better to help manage supply.

This study aims to consider the developing of strategic use of big data in association with long-linked physical goods supply focusing on risk management.

Analysis is grounded on a case study of organizing the import of machine parts from Shanghai, China, to Norway. An analytical framework is developed through a literature review on long linked supply chains, big data and risk management.

Analysis reveals that big data use in this scenario encompasses mainly around handling risks associated with transformations in the supply chain, a data-driven approach. Complexity is founded in transformation – the flows of goods and information. Supply chain dynamics represent an important source for data acquisition for big data analytics.

The qualitative nature of the study limits the aim of generalization. An alternative view of big data as process is discussed and proposed, adapted to supply chain management and industrial marketing functionality.

This is the first part in an ongoing research project aimed at developing a research approach to study information technology use in the inherently complex setting and scope of a long linked supply network. This scope of investigation enhances big data associated with operations dynamics providing foundation for future research on how to use big data to mitigate risk in long linked supply chains.

In a volatile marketplace, warehouse management is fundamentally contingent of changes in its supply network environment. Flexibility is therefore a key logistics issue in distribution centre management. This study probes into the nature of warehouse flexibility in a supply network through simulation.

By using the FlexSim simulation tool the dynamic behaviour of the warehouse system are conceptualised, documented, simulated, analysed and evaluated.

Simulation revealed that external changes affect daily processes and the reorganisation of warehouse processes. Given the extensity of resource use, simulation also revealed that process reorganisation should not be a daily undertaking. This is because warehouse processes react in unpredictable and different manners to even the smallest disturbance from the environment. This reaction is not necessarily negative impending more long-term change of warehouse processes.

The warehouse is a complex system that self-adapts with limited need to calculate new optimised warehouse processes to counter changes in its environment. Rather than following deterministic optimisation procedures, the development of flexible resources is a key issue in warehouse management. The applied simulation model is generic and therefore applicable in other distribution centres pointing to how to monitor warehouse processes to in a pre-emptively develop warehouse flexibility through change of process context.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the interdependencies involved and how interaction takes place in the context of a project organization as a network of academic and business actors.

This study focuses on relationships between business and academia and applies a single case research strategy. Data are collected through a series of theoretically sampled in-depth interviews including company observations. The single case study provides a rich narrative of the network structure and processes involved in establishing, implementing and completing a research project in Poland. The Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group network approach focusing on resource combinations that emerge in a network structure characterized by interdependency and integration is applied to analyze interaction in this project-organized network.

Change in interdependencies, interaction and integration are analyzed individually, and in conclusion in relation to each other. While supply chain management literature postulates that integration is a management goal, a driver of successful business, this study points out that integration is an outcome of interaction in a context of changing interdependencies. This means that managerial focus should rather be driven to understanding the nature of network interdependencies, their path of change and how interaction is carried out in this emergent context.

The study aims to help better understand the potential for research project cooperation by explaining how businesses and research units can cooperate through an understanding that integration is a complex phenomenon, focusing on how management may better support services production through careful consideration of that integration is developed through considerations of interdependencies as context of interaction in the varied business cultures a project network comprises. Project management is more a learning process than a planning process.

This paper's aim is to develop an understanding of how responsiveness in a supply network may be approached from a combined relationship marketing (RM) and supply chain management (SCM) view in a complete seafood supply network context.

The paper takes the form of a case study of the upstream part of an integrated supply network from broodstock to predominately export sales.

Developing responsiveness involves two types of competence; technically generating value through the supply network through product transformations and knowing what the end‐user perceives as value. SCM is proposed as generating value through technical product‐transforming processes while RM as facilitating customer sensing through developed conceptions of value perception in the context of business relationships. Intertwining SCM and RM competencies to achieve responsive product supply is proposed by using Alderson's largely unnoticed transvection understanding of complete marketing channels.

The paper is a novel combination of business management fields evoking differences and complementarities to develop business relationships through intertwining RM and SCM to secure value realisation from an end‐user perspective from a multi‐tier supply network perspective. In business practice this approach provides a mindset and some developed models useful in both strategic planning of a company's role in a wider supply chain setting as well as guidance regarding the purpose of cross‐functional teamwork in operations.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a more precise conceptual understanding of the interplay between food product traceability and supply network integration.

A resource‐based network approach was used to create a framework with empirical evidence from a fresh strawberry product case.

A conceptual model describes product traceability as interacting with different organizational and informational resources.

This is a preliminary model that substantiates a cross‐functional approach teamwork‐based to developing product traceability.

The study shows developing food product traceability as a complex undertaking dependent on information connectivity including a technical aspect of supply chain integration, and different forms of knowledge, an organizational aspect of supply chain integration.

The paper aims to explore the effects of geographic proximity among firms in value networks on service provision and service exchange.

A case study of the offshore supply vessel shipbuilding and shipping cluster in the North-Western Møre region of Norway with focus on the new ship contracting process.

The case study reveals how service provision and service exchange are facilitated by geographical proximity among firms.

Study findings should be validated in further research, and the effects of other forms of proximity (cultural, social, cognitive and institutional) on co-creation of value also need to be considered. Considering the role of operant resources in developing competence in clusters and wider value networks offers interesting opportunities for further research.

This study proposes an alternative view of co-creation of value in value networks and responds to calls for research on how value network attributes affect aspects of co-creation of value: service provision and service exchange. The study contributes to more knowledge on the systemic nature of value creation in value networks.