It is with a great honor we welcome you to the 31^st International IPSERA Conference here in Jönköping, Sweden. It has been 21 years since the last IPSERA conference in Jönköping and two years since we last gathered in person to share our passion for the field of purchasing and supply chain management. Although the last two years have been extremely challenging for everyone all around the world, we would like to think we have also gained invaluable lessons and skills going through this unprecedented experience. One of them being the use of online platforms to provide learning opportunities in a form and shape that was not possible before. Consequently, this conference will be the very first IPSERA conference to be held in hybrid format, allowing professionals and academics to share their work both in person and online.

The theme of this conference is “building bridges” which is inspired by the overwhelming collaboration across the world in the last two years to overcome global challenges. We believe that now is the time to take a step further, move beyond borders, and collaborate at all levels to strengthen our supply chain. We have begun building bridges here at home where in a unique opportunity the School of Engineering (JTH) and Jönköping International Business School (JIBS) are co-hosting IPSERA 2022 at Jönköping University.

The interest in this year’s conference has been heartwarming. We received a total of 191 abstract and paper submissions from 29 countries. Thanks to the effort of our Scientific Committee members, all papers received a double-blind review which yielded 164 final papers to be included in the program. Among these final papers, 43 are competitive, 118 are working papers, and 3 are practitioner papers. These papers will be presented by 236 participants, 170 will be attending the conference in person and 66 will be joining us online. Among the 236 attendees, 93 are PhD students.

We would like to thank all authors who submitted their work to this conference and patiently collaborated with us to organize the conference. We would like to extend our gratitude to the members of the editorial board and Scientific Committee for their continuous support in this past year. We hope for the 31^st IPSERA conference to be the one for you to remember, possibly with the help of the social part of the program and our famous Swedish Fika!