Altogether the article provides an adequate basis to answer the question whether a supplier should adopt a GAM program or not in an articulate manner of speaking. The elaboration supports a supplier to figure out, if he first of all should even implement it, secondly which of his customers are applicable candidates and at last which form of GAM programs is the best for the company. Additionally the practical examples of different companies which have already integrated GAM are very adjuvant and demonstrative and help to understand the different possibilities of realisation in practice.
For the formulations of the question the article provides different criteria to answer the three questions and helps the supplier to analyse his customers by offering a bride questionnaire. Especially the practical framework given by a scorecard can help the supplier to underline his decision. This scorecard supports the classification of the customers by depicting customer characteristics and adapting generalised scoring guidelines. So a supplier has the possibility to get an overview of how many and which customers are candidates for a GAM program.
Beside these positive aspects of the paper there are different facets of the article which are arguable. To take a critical evaluation of the article it seems that the author appears to be biased in favour of the instrument GAM. There is no real discussion and argumentation of GAM showing different advantages and disadvantages of an implementation and utilisation. This has the consequence that the article has the effect of being few subjective and not entire scientific. This impression arises especially from the fact that there are rarely empirical evidences to emphasize the arguments. The author uses figures which are not proved to explain his view and does not point out the background information of his analysis, e.g. “these programs can improve customers satisfaction by 20% or more”. This statement remains rather imprecise and it is difficult for the reader to classify the information and the individual impact in consideration of the context.
The missing quantitative evidence continues in the practical part of the article, because the scorecard criteria are not clearly defined but classified with describing adjectives. For instance the customer characteristic “Cultural fit” is divided in three categories: 10 = Complete fit, 5= partial fit and 0= no fit. So the customer has to decide on his own the individual sorting and it can be assumed that many suppliers will have problems to classify their customers on this inexact base. In particular this article has the approach to give a general overview of the topic and probably has got a target group without much background information.
Overall the article provides an initial overview of the most important steps to get familiar with the topic of implementing GAM and in particular to start on the subject it seems to be useful. However, it should be noted that implementing GAM is a major step for a supplier and has far reaching effects for the strategic positioning of the supplier and the future relationship with the customer. If a supplier decides to adopt GAM it is vital that it works with benefits on both sides, the customer and the supplier. Considering these facts, such a decision should be taken on a broader base of information validated by detailed empirical studies and a more precise scorecard.