Özet:

Abstract enOn account of fierce competition, the companies has increasingly been forced to focus on strategic management. The prosperity of strategic management which sees the company as a system depends on the formation of each component in the system in a way as to accomplish certain objectives. The function of purchasing which is mostly seen as a secondary function and which is taken into consideration more seriously in recent years has been as significant as the other functions of the company in terms of strategic management. The studies which have been done in recent years has indicated that the function of purchasing should play significant roles in the process of strategic decision making. The objectives of this study can be stated as pointing out the roles of purchasing function in the process of strategic management and to emphasize that the companies can increase their competitive effectiveness by adapting the department of purchasing to the process of strategic management. In order to achieve this, firstly, the basic profile of strategic management has been clarified, then, the cause and effect relationships of requirements concerning the formation of an effective purchasing function in companies have been analyzed, and finally three middle-sized companies in food sector have been examined in view of the great significance that the purchasing department has. The purchasing departments of those three companies have also been analyzed in terms of their present structures, the roles that they play and their participation in strategic decisions. The method of this survey is interviewing in which the top executives of those companies, the executives of purchasing, marketing and production departments were asked nine questions. First of all, the companies were evaluated individually regarding the responses they had given and then the following conclusions were drawn in view of those evaluations; –– The purchasing departments have a crucial role in the life of the companies of food sector. –– Two companies except Dardanel which has foreign investor, however, do not even realize this role. –– The purchasing departments of those two companies have been either positioned in a false hierarchical order, or they have been formed as secondary or lower departments. –– These departments have been making purchasing decisions by the executives of marketing or production departments. –– The purchasing departments of these companies act as a data storage of current activities rather than gathering information about supplier environments, sharing such information with other departments and transferring it into strategic decisions.

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