Description

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Is your company saving money by using outside suppliers? Is outsourcing reliable? As a result, is your company gaining a competitive edge? Or would the company do better by keeping some of the efforts in-house? And how is the performance of outside suppliers and in-house functions measured to facilitate effective sourcing decisions? These are questions the author, a specialist in corporate performance improvement, tackles in this book. The answers are surprising, and the guidance presented will have far-reaching benefits for organizations. He maintains that companies' expectations from outsourcing are not being met, because there is not a methodical approach to measuring and evaluating the performance of sources. By fully assessing the performance of available sources, the best can be selected and the company can benefit long term. Succinctly and comprehensively, Maromonte guides companies step by step through his proprietary techniques for sourcing performance assessment and decision making. His book will be an important, useful resource for senior management and executives, operations managers, finance, purchasing and quality professional, and anyone with responsibility for bottom-line results.

To improve competitiveness in the global marketplace, companies are reducing costs through outsourcing--the purchase of goods and services from suppliers. In many cases, outsourcing is less expensive for companies than producing these goods and services internally. Companies, however, do not always achieve their ultimate goal of competing more effectively. This is because decisions to outsource are primarily based on the promise of lower direct costs, without considering other source performance criteria that also impact costs and ultimately competitiveness.

Corporate Strategic Business Sourcing guides management in selecting the best sources--those that will raise performance to world-class levels and improve competitiveness. To improve sourcing decisions, the concept of the Strategic Business Unit, or SBU, is applied to each source being considered to provide the company with goods and services. Following the SBU approach, similar product and service lines are grouped together in the corporation. As a result quality levels, delivery performance, customer service, and product advancements, as well as costs, are more easily measured and improved. Just as the focus on these five criteria leads to improved SBU performance, the same approach can be applied to enhance the performance of the individual sources of goods and services. This is accomplished by similarily quantifying and improving the quality, delivery, cost, customer service and product advancement performance of the companies' sources, whether outside suppliers or in-house functions.

About the Author

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KEVIN R. MAROMONTE is a Performance Improvement Consultant. With more than 17 years of experience in various corporate and consulting capacities, he has worked in a wide range of industries, such as industrial manufacturing, automotive, chemical processing, consumer products, defense, and electronics. Maromonte is author of Building the Invisible Quality Corporation: The Executive Guide to Transcending TQM (Quorum, 1996).