Materials Management and Buying Behaviour

Ever since the industrial revolution, companies have been trying to improve their overall performance. Most of the attention and efforts were directed towards reducing labour cost by improving productivity. This inward‐looking situation was possible as everything produced was usually easily sold (production capacity being smaller than demand for industrial products). Hardly any marketing effort was needed as customers were dependent on the producers in this sellers' market. On the “other side” of the company raw materials (and later energy) were abundantly available and cheap as many were imported from colonies without any political or economic power. Furthermore the raw material needs of the companies were not very complex. Internally, production processes were relatively simple with few intermediate stages so that the material flow through the company was easily managed and if something did go wrong, long delivery times or even failure to deliver did not have a long term impact on the companies' sales level.