Recently, the paradigm of business management has been shifted to competition among supply chains. In this trend, the integration and optimization have emerged as core values that companies should pursue to survive in their industries. It is not exceptional for companies related to ship management business. These companies subcontract with ship repair companies with specialties in the maintenance, repair, and renovation of ships to reduce the uncertainties and risks of their business. In this case, the relationship between ship management companies and ship repair companies is based on mutual expectations with win-win strategies beyond a simple business relationship. As for ship management companies, they can reduce expenses and increase the efficacy of their business throughout the partnership with their subcontractors. Ship repair companies, as subcontractors, can improve their profitability by reducing operating expenses, and enhance their technical competitiveness while making efforts to satisfy their prime contractors. The mutual relationship between ship management and repair industries is worthy of being identified.
Based on this interest, this paper aims to empirically explore how the partnership between the two industries influences on the satisfaction of ship management companies. In addition, this paper intends to provide relevant information to enhance the competitiveness of ship repair companies by revealing the causalities of variations consisting of the partnership between ship management companies and ship repair companies.
To reach to the goals, this paper set up a research model from literature review and hypotheses. In addition to conventional research variables, this paper inferred the industrial factors which determined the partnership, and, to select characteristic factors in the industries, drew 33 factors through interviews and discussions from ship management companies and their subcontract. This paper also created questionnaires structured by categorizing variables by factor. To verify the hypotheses, this paper empirically analyzed the interviews 107 workers from marine and administrative divisions, and 35 workers from ship management companies. The collected data were analyzed by descriptive statistics, trust, and factor analyses using SPSS 18.0. In addition, this paper used confirmatory factor analysis twice by AMOS 19.
From these methods, the paper reached to results of this study as follows.
First, ship management companies make a partnership with 11 types of business. Among them, repair business occupied the biggest part as 28.3%, followed by electrical and electronics, navigation and communication, and spare part businesses. The partnership with these companies lasted 7.96 years in average.
Second, among 33 factors gained from discussion with experts, 5 factors including the initiative for problem solving, negotiation for project expenses, capacity of material supply, network with subcontractors, and duration approval were removed throughout factor analysis. In addition, In the first confirmatory factor analysis, 7 factors including unexpected situations, repairable capability, emotional feelings, repair of ships under management, duration of project, voluntary efforts, and unit prices of parts were removed in the process of removing modification indices. Hence, 12 factors were removed in total.
Third, interdependence and information sharing, which have been proved in many other prior studies, were revealed to influence on satisfaction through different ways respectively. Interdependence influences on satisfaction through trust, while information sharing directly influences on satisfaction without passing through trust and commitment as prior factors.
Fourth, as a result of regression analysis to verify the mediated effects of trust, the total effects of interdependence on satisfaction were bigger than the direct effects of interdependence mediated by trust. This result implies that trust partly plays a role of medium.
This paper revealed what characteristics are embedded in the partnership between ship management companies, and how the consisting factors of this partnership influences on satisfaction throughout prior factors. In addition, this paper explored the variables that influence on the satisfaction of ship repair companies. This effort is expected to contribute on the improvement of ship repair companies’ competitiveness in satisfying customers by recognizing the importance of partnership and managing the factors that influence on the satisfaction of ship management companies.