Search results for "sourcing"
showing 10 items of 214 documents
Shaping inter-firm collaboration in new product development in the automobile industry: A trade-off between a transaction and relational-based approa…
2008
Abstract Shaping collaboration in the new product development (NPD) has always been a very difficult task, especially in complex industries like the automobile one. This complexity is particularly true during the engineering phase of the NPD process, where different complex systems are to be designed in a collaborative way. Basically, two-kind of approaches have been observed in the literature and industry: one is more related to market transactions, specifically the west car-company style, the other is more relational based, as in the Japanese car-company style. Now, the increasing globalisation of the industry asks for a merge of the two approaches; indeed, the increasing use of standard …
Fine slicing of the value chain and offshoring of essential activities: empirical evidence from European multinationals
2014
The offshoring of more advanced activities is increasing and a debate about the limits of offshoring has emerged. Companies are fine-slicing their value chains, and moving beyond the offshoring of peripheral and non-core activities to the offshoring of advanced and essential activities that are closer to their core (e.g. research, design and product development). The challenge is to understand the limits of offshoring and the most appropriate modes of offshoring. The purpose of this paper is to analyze what activities are offshorable and how best to govern offshored activities. We argue that companies are redefining their core activities and in this process, some essential activities previo…
Linking design management skills and design function organization: An empirical study of Spanish and Italian ceramic tile producers
2007
Abstract Design management is an increasingly important concept, research into which is very scarce. This paper deals with the fit between design management skills and design function organization, ranging from solely in-house to solely outsourced and including a mixture of the two. We carried out a survey in the Spanish and Italian ceramic tile industry, to which 177 product development managers responded. Our results revealed that companies have different degrees of design management skills depending on the approach to design function organization. Solely in-house design approach companies are the most skilled firms and solely outsourced ones are the least skilled. Despite the fact that t…
Universal Design of Information Sharing Tools for Disaster Risk Reduction
2019
International audience; Disaster information sharing tools are an important aspect of disaster resilience, and it is of utmost importance that these tools are accessible and usable for as many potential users as possible. In this paper, we evaluate the accessibility of a selection of tools for crowdsourcing disaster situation information. As our evaluation shows that the selected tools are not fully accessible, we provide recommendations for mitigation, as well as highlight the importance of further research in this area.
Socio-technical Congruence Sabotaged by a Hidden Onshore Outsourcing Relationship: Lessons Learned from an Empirical Study
2012
Despite the popularity of outsourcing arrangements, distributed software development is still regarded as a complex endeavor. Complexity primarily comes from the challenges in communication and coordination among participating organizations. In this paper we discuss lessons learned from participatory research carried out in a highly distributed onshore outsourcing project. Previous research established that socio-technical congruence principles alleviate distributed work. In practice we have found that alignment between the systems structure and organizational structure can be studied from different abstraction levels and also during different phases of project lifecycle. We have found that…
Outsourcing within the Nordic context: Care services for older people in Finland.
2018
The early 1990s economic setback brought significant reforms favoring the outsourcing of care in Finnish municipalities. Here, outsourcing refers to the practice of municipalities employing private organizations through different means (e.g., open tendering) to deliver public care services. In this context, this study examines the growth in the outsourcing of service housing and home-help services in 311 municipalities from 2001 to 2015 and investigates the municipal factors associated with outsourcing using four dimensions: care needs, population size, economic situation, and political ideology of the municipality. The findings reveal a steep increase in the outsourcing of home-help and se…
Transnational turn and national models of higher education - The case of Finland
2014
The purpose of the article is to problematize the relationship between the Nordic democratic public higher education tradition and transnational market driven knowledge economy policies. The article illustrates this development with two cases -- quality assurance and internationalisation policies -- where external demands, based mostly on market ideologies, have been introduced with apparently transnational incentives but having national implementations. These transnational pressures are related to a kind of soft governance of higher education policy, characterized by networked decision making and use of expert consultants, which possibly promotes flexible decision-making and efficiency, bu…
The curvilinear effect of manufacturing outsourcing and captive-offshoring on firms' innovation: The role of temporal endurance
2019
Abstract This paper aims to contribute to the open debate in the literature on the effect of global sourcing strategies on firm performance by studying the consequences of manufacturing outsourcing and captive-offshoring for the innovation capability of the firm. We grounded our hypotheses based on the outsourcing and offshoring literature and by narrowing our focus to the effects of persisting in their adoption over time. We tested our hypotheses using data from a sample of 368 manufacturing companies listed on NASDAQ stock market. The paper provides theoretical explanations and empirical findings for the inverted U-shaped influence of keeping doing captive-offshoring on new product develo…
Outsourcing and efficiency: the case of Spanish citrus farming
2006
Outsourcing in agriculture has traditionally been seen as a managerial strategy of smaller farms to achieve higher levels of efficiency. In this article, we provide empirical evidence supporting the existence of a positive relationship between outsourcing and efficiency in Spanish citrus farming. Outsourcing is measured by the proportion of outsourced labor and capital in farms' total use of these production factors, i.e., the higher the proportion of outsourced inputs, the higher the degree of outsourcing. Making use of data envelopment analysis techniques, we compute input-specific reductions required to achieve technical efficiency at the farm level. Our results show that attainment of t…
ON THE HETEROGENEOUS EMPLOYMENT EFFECTS OF OFFSHORING: IDENTIFYING PRODUCTIVITY AND DOWNSIZING CHANNELS
2014
I. INTRODUCTION For the most part of the last two decades Germany suffered from a hangover of the reunification boom, an overvalued exchange rate, high unemployment, and low growth--so The Economist famously named it the "Sick Man of Europe." At the same time, German companies were relocating production, restructuring, and offshoring. The general public associated such offshoring activities--not only in Germany--with plant closures which made the headlines and confirmed the perception that offshoring was a job killer.1 What usually does not make the news is that such downsizing effects of offshoring may be counterbalanced by productivity effects in the restructuring firm. Depending on their…