Organizing for Outsourcing: The Case of Purchasing & Supply Management

Virpi Turkulainen, Lydia Bals

    Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperResearchpeer-review

    Abstract

    Outsourcing remains one of the most prevalent business practices. Still, many businesses fail to realize the benefits anticipated from their outsourcing initiative. Research reports that one major reason for these outsourcing challenges are in the design of the focal organization. In this paper, we take an organization design view to outsourcing and elaborate on the organizational design implications for outsourcing. We present a multi-year case study from 2010 to 2013 of a global chemical and pharmaceutical company (GCC), which went through an organization redesign and subsequently successfully outsourced some organizational tasks. Specifically, we take the case of the Purchasing & Supply Management (PSM) function to illustrate how an activity-based organization design can facilitate outsourcing of some parts of the PSM function.
    Original languageEnglish
    Publication date2016
    Number of pages39
    Publication statusPublished - 2016
    EventThe Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2016: Making Organizations Meaningful - Anaheim, United States
    Duration: 5 Aug 20169 Aug 2016
    Conference number: 76
    http://aom.org/annualmeeting/

    Conference

    ConferenceThe Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2016
    Number76
    Country/TerritoryUnited States
    CityAnaheim
    Period05/08/201609/08/2016
    Internet address

    Keywords

    • Outsourcing
    • Organization design
    • Purchasing and supply management
    • Purchasing organization
    • Case study

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