In this paper we present and test an alternative model for competitive capabilities.Traditionally, a cumulative model has been viewed as having one sequence of buildingoperations capabilities in a ...
This article is an Introduction to this Special Issue on “eBusiness and Supply Chain Management.” It also provides a vision for eBusiness and supply chain for the future.
We examine the recent supply chain phenomenon of outsourcing front‐end business processes in this paper. Few, if any, of the existing theories provide satisfactory explanation for the rapid growth in this area. We use a model proposed by Sridhar and Balachandran [Sridhar, S.S., Balachandran, B.V. 1997. Incomplete information, task assignment, and managerial control systems. Manage. Sci. 43(6), 764–778] to determine the factors that might contribute to this phenomenon. Our analysis reveals that the ability of the vendor to forecast the task environment without bias and to gain sophistication in interpreting contract terms might make the firm indifferent between outsourcing and retaining front‐end processes in‐house. We validate our findings against the work of Apte and Mason [Apte, U.M., Mason, R.O., 1995. Global disaggregation of information‐intensive services. Manage. Sci. 41(7), 1250–1262], who develop a theoretical framework to identify criteria for companies to select services to be outsourced. They base their decisions predominantly on the nature of “customer contact.” The combined theories are shown to provide a rich framework for identifying customer‐facing tasks that can be outsourced.
This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal ( http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy ). This article has been retracted at the request of the co‐Editor‐in‐Chief. The retraction has been agreed due to data reporting irregularities, following an investigation conducted by the Journal. We apologize that this was not detected during the submission and review process.
We investigate how recent advances in information technology and telecommunications have led to real‐time monitoring of processes at the site of the provider by a buyer located across the globe. We construct a game‐theoretic model of the dynamics of the buyer–supplier interaction in the presence of moral hazard and incomplete contracting. We derive the Minimum Quality Threshold (MQT) below which the provider's output will certainly be inspected. Our findings show that the buyer can pick a level of monitoring and thereby force the provider to exceed the quality level of the MQT in output quality and avoid costly and wasteful inspection. Finally, our model explains why the production of processes that are complex and more prone to errors are actually monitored less by the buyers. We furnish the results of a comprehensive, multi‐year, multi‐country survey of the efficacy of monitoring in off‐shore outsourcing projects and demonstrate strong empirical support for the findings of the model.
This paper provides an introduction to a special issue on the offshoring of service and knowledge work. Brief descriptions are provided for 13 papers that fall into three categories including strategic and organizational issues, global and knowledge supply‐chain issues, and tactical issues. The intent of this special issue was to provide a venue for presenting numerous perspectives on the operational and cross‐disciplinary challenges and opportunities in the area of service and knowledge offshoring.
Professional service firms have distinct operational challenges due to the type of work that is transacted by the employees of these firms, and due to the nature of the employees themselves. In this paper, we develop and present factors that influence professional service operations in firms and compensation structures for professional service providers. We establish professional service influence factors, which we posit will impact agency relationships in professional service firms. That is, we hypothesize that professional service influence factors (PSIFs) will moderate the effect of task programmability and outcome measurability in predicting the use of behavior‐ or outcome‐based compensation schemes (control strategy). Logistic regression is used on data provided by 192 professional service providers in order to examine the impact of the agency variables and moderating factors on control strategies. The results indicate that company‐ and profession‐based factors have moderating effects on task programmability when predicting control strategy. We discuss the implications of our findings.
The paper analyzes the impact of e‐business technologies on maintenance management and supply chain operations. The aim of this work is to investigate the network organization level of supply chains in case of remote maintenance application and to understand how maintenance policies are coupled with information technology (IT) solutions. To this purpose two literature reviews are presented: firstly, on the supply chain and network integration, and then on the evolution of maintenance using information technology. Following this, the paper present four specific industrial case‐studies of eMRO network organisation. They have been chosen as reference models from a set of practical applications and pilot tests performed by the authors in different production sectors in the last 5 years. Technology complexity environments, maintenance outsourcing level, and supply chain integration context are discussed for each case‐studies with particular regards to the profitable forms of collaboration provided by the introduction of IT and the Web. This analysis work toward the development of a framework useful to: (1) classify different e‐maintenance systems and understand the relationships between the different members of the network, and (2) identify the variables which can influence the introduction and development of the systems.
In industrial purchasing a request for quotation (RFQ) can consist of a single item, but is most often composed of two or more products and/or services bundled together. While such bundles are used in offline purchase negotiations, their criticality is heightened in online auctions due to their usual short duration and constrained bidding environment. Despite this importance, little systematic discussion or evaluation has taken place concerning bundling practice, especially as it relates to the individual items included in the bundle, the overall bundle composition, and the resulting supply base and ultimate bundle performance. This study investigates these issues by developing a conceptual model and testing it with a large‐scale survey completed by purchasing professionals practicing bundling in B2B online auctions. Results indicate that crafting a more homogeneous bundle is most important in achieving a successful outcome. Furthermore, more complex or difficult‐to‐specify items do not impact perceived bundle performance, but do influence the supply base that is willing and able to bid on the business.