Building Relationships with Partners in a Supply Chain

Recognizing in today's economic reality the exceptional importance of cooperation of companies within different networks, the author of this paper addresses the problem of building relationships with partners in a supply chain, treating the quality of these relations as a key success factor of their cooperation. The author focuses on small businesses since he believes that due to their limited potential, small businesses particularly need the support of other companies in their current operations, while at the same time for the same reasons they evidently face difficulties in building partnerships with well-established entities in their business environment. Therefore, in the empirical part of the paper, the author aims at making the identification of actions taken by small businesses to build relationships with supply chain partners as well as at assessing their effectiveness. The research hypotheses set were verified positively. The hypotheses assume that managers of small businesses are aware of the impact of the quality of relationships connecting them with supply chain partners on the effects of cooperation with them. Unfortunately, they apply a narrow range of actions to build those relationships. However, it needs to be emphasized that such actions do bring visible results.