Strategic sourcing: a progressive approach to the make-or-buy decision

Abstract

Executive Overview Historically, many firms have made sourcing decisions—commonly known as make-or-buy decisions—based disproportionately on unit cost, with insufficient regard for strategic or technological issues. This cost-focused approach has led to competitive tragedy for many firms, indeed, entire industries. Managers need better tools for evaluating sourcing decisions—tools that can accommodate the long-term, strategic issues. This article presents such a tool, the strategic sourcing model, which augments the traditional cost analysis by considering strategic and technological factors. Using this framework, in conjunction with a cost analysis, can help companies make the sourcing decisions that will move them into the leagues of world-class manufacturing and position them for sustained competitive success in the future.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 234 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.