Per V. Jenster, Henrik Stener Pedersen, Patricia Plackett, David Hussey
ISBN: 0-470-84490-6
Cloth
202 pages
February 2005

Outsourcing became fashionable in the late 1980s, came of age in the 1990s and is now in this century a normal part of corporate life. Built from three long established principles -corporate focus on core competencies, make or buy cost analysis, and the preferred supplier concepts of total quality management. Much of outsourcing was initially at the easily definable end of the spectrum, such as having a supplier make a component previously undertaken in house, or the management of the company cafeteria. Such examples are still part of outsourcing, but the big opportunities for suppliers lie at the other end of the spectrum, where suppliers become strategic partners of the organisation for a specific, but not always easy to define set of activities. For example: to add product improvement and development to the supply of a sub assembly, when previously not even the components were bought out, or even the outsourcing of entire departments, such as accounting or R&D. This book covers new elements of outsourcing including: what form of relationship or strategic alliance should be established between the buyer and the supplier, the scope, scale and importance of what is outsourced, the pricing and risk sharing involved, and changes to organisations which lead them to seek more outsourcing. It covers a gap in current literature coverage by focusing on the relationship between buyer and supplier in the outsourcing process as a key component in effective implementation and maximum profit.