Date Approved

4-26-2016

Degree Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department or School

College of Technology

Committee Member

Dorothy McAllen, Ph.D., Chair

Committee Member

Alphonso Bellamy, Ph.D.

Committee Member

John Dugger III, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Huei Lee, Ph.D.

Abstract

The U.S. automotive industry is a vitally important industry to our nation; over 7,000,000 individuals directly rely on this industry for their livelihood (Hill, K. (2014). Just How High‐Tech is the Automotive Industry? Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Automotive Research (CAR)). This study investigated the use of electronic supply chain management (e-SCM) system usage within this industry and its influence on work-related procurement outcomes. An electronic questionnaire was used to gather perceptions consistent with the constructs of the technology acceptance model, or “TAM” (Davis, F. D. (1985). A technology acceptance model for empirically testing new end-user information systems: theory and results. Published Doctoral Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.) It examined e-SCM systems used in the automotive industry to test whether factors such as ease of system use (EOU) and perception of organizational usefulness (PU) are factors in regarding a decision to use e-SCM systems within the procurement function of their own organizations.

The results of the survey analysis showed that the perceptions of organizational usefulness, as well as the ease of system use, are each variables affecting the final adoption of such systems within individual organizations. Further findings showed that these variables, along with other factors, including individual experience, educational level, and gender, were important in predicting work outcomes within this industry, in terms of overall results and predicting organizational decision outcomes. As such, this research offers an understanding of the factors that are critical to achieving continued innovation and corresponding industry success for organizations and individuals alike, transacting business at all supply chain levels within the U.S. automotive industry.

Further research efforts should focus on the examination of the usage of this same model and corresponding survey instrument toward other manufacturing-based U.S. industries (such as aerospace/defense or pharmaceutical/medical) as well as other countries’ automotive industries, such as Germany and Japan, for generalizability perspectives.

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