Managing Sourcing of Products and Services.
详细信息
文摘
Operations of modern businesses increasingly rely on two sourcing strategies: procurement of goods from global suppliers,and outsourcing of non-core business processes to external vendors. In this dissertation,I examine the role of different operational levers in the efficient management of these challenges in attaining improved operational performance for firms. In the first chapter,"Managing Global Sourcing: Inventory Performance",I conduct a firm-level empirical examination of the net impact of the extent and diversification of global sourcing on capital invested in inventory. For this,the global sourcing dataset is augmented by financial information from Compustat as well as sourcing characteristics of supplier countries extracted from the World Bank and other web sources. Using a simultaneous equation model,the analysis identifies the dominant of the competing hypotheses embedded in the studied strategies that come from the vast body of theoretical literature. In particular,it establishes that,all else equal,more global sourcing leads to a higher inventory investment,while diversification among global suppliers leads to a lower inventory investment. The second chapter,"Global Supply Chains: Sourcing Strategies and Supply Chain Resilience",studies the impact of three global sourcing strategies--supplier diversification,relational sourcing,and propensity to source from logistically efficient locations--on post-disruption recovery rate,an important component of supply chain resilience. A slow post-disruption recovery implies a continued mismatch between ordered and correspondingly delivered quantity to a firm,which may result in significant financial losses. Building on a structural association between recovery rate and delivered quantity process,the analysis establishes that supply chains with low supplier diversification and more relational sourcing have high post-disruption recovery rates. Further,it finds no significant difference between the recovery rate of supply chains that have a higher propensity to source from logistically efficient locations compared to those with a lower propensity. The last part of the dissertation complements the "macro-lens" of the earlier chapters,which studies effectiveness of sourcing strategies at the supplier portfolio level,by examining operational inefficiencies arising out of contractual challenges between a firm and its supplier. These operational inefficiencies naturally constrains the effectiveness of sourcing strategies. A vast body of extant literature employs this "micro-lens" of firm-supplier contractual relationship in a variety of settings to identify and mitigate challenges in attaining higher operational performance. Inspired by an important yet nascent area in this literature,I study contractual challenges in co-production settings； settings wherein the performance of an operational process is determined jointly by the efforts of the firm and the service provider. In such joint effort settings,each player may have incentives to free-ride on the other players effort. Often a firms inability to verify such efforts precludes the use of direct contracts on them to eliminate the innate free-riding incentive. This,in turn,leads to the double-sided moral hazard problem and may result in suboptimal system outcomes. Motivated by wide-spread instances of co-production settings in the repair and restoration service industry,I study the efficacy of performance-based contractual structures in a representative setting of the repair industry in the third chapter,"Optimal Contracts for Outsourcing of Repair and Restoration Services". In this last chapter,I examine the efficacy of two contractual structures--linear,commonly studied in the double-moral hazard literature,and tiered,commonly used in the repair services industry--in mitigating the agency issue in a co-production repair outsourcing setting wherein the service provider is concerned about contract-induced financial distress. Interestingly,the analysis reveals that despite the limited penalty structure,which may attenuate the incentives of the service provider,the tiered contractual structure dominates the performance of the linear contractual structure under all conditions. This finding sheds light on the extensive use of tiered contracts observed in practice. Abstract shortened by UMI.).