Back-sourcing is the practice of bringing a once outsourced process back to the originating firm. Prior research have established that the opposite of back-sourcing, outsourcing, has generated positive market reactions. This study uses event study methodology to examine market reactions to back-sourcing. The results strongly support the idea that back-sourcing is a good strategic decision.

W e analyze a model that integrates demand shaping via dynamic pricing and risk mitigation via supply diversification. The firm under consideration replenishes a certain product from a set of capacitated suppliers for a pricedependent demand in each period. Under deterministic capacities, we derive a multilevel base stock list price policy and establish the optimality of cost-based supplier sel...

This paper is concerned with the economic trade-offs associated with open-sourcing, the business strategy of releasing free open-source versions of commercial software products. The effect of the release of open-source versions on the customers’ perception of products is an important determinant of open-sourcing outcomes. We model open-sourcing as a strategic option for firms that compete in th...

Companies need to acquire the right capabilities from the right source, and the right shore, at the right cost to improve their competitive position. Capability sourcing is an organizing process to gain access to best-in-class capabilities for all activities in a firm’s value chain to ensure long-term competitive advantage. In this paper, capability sourcing modeling is introduced as a techniqu...

As the Information Systems Offshoring and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) phenomena continue to grow and gain popularity, it is becoming increasingly evident that there is a need to consider a combination of the two, that is, Offshore BPO of IS Processes. This paper explores the factors that a multi-national organisation considered when it “offshored” its IS business processes to lower-cost ...

Research summary: This paper studies the coordination burden for firms that pursue variety as their main product strategy. We propose that product variety magnifies the tension between scale economies in production and scope economies in distribution, giving rise to complex sourcing relationships. Sourcing complexity worsens performance and poses a dilemma for organization design: A hierarchica...

Increasingly, software is no longer developed as a single system, but rather as a smart combination of so-called software services. Each of these provides an independent, specific and relatively small piece of functionality, which is typically accessible through the Internet from internal or external service providers. There are no standards or models that describe the sourcing process of these...

Decision Guidance Systems provide supply managers with a powerful tool to handle complex sourcing issues. Supply organizations have several hundreds of items on one complex bid. Satisfying both user and multiple business unit objectives requires software that allows the sourcing team to rapidly analyze an unlimited number of alternatives. Doing so enables the firm to realize a higher percentage...