Strategic Sourcing: Competitive Advantage in Supply Chain

The competitive market situation has created a shift in companies strategy thinking. Strategies focus increasingly on core activities and business development. One effect of this is that companies choose to outsource activities they dont consider to be core business (Van Weele, 2010, Thrulogachantar and Zailani, 2011). The purpose of this study is to investigate strategic sourcing (SS) plans that organization can apply to increase their competitive advantage. The research will have conducted through a qualitative study with a deductive approach. A multi-case study will be made on small& medium enterprises (SME) in India with unstructured& semi-structured interviews, questionnaire, survey at each company. The investigation resulted in a current view of SMEs sourcing and suitable recommendations for SMEs to direct their purchasing activities to strategic sourcing. The process of implementing a strategic sourcing for SMEs can be seen as relatively difficult but there are purchasing activities that can be improved by a strategic thinking. To keep in mind is that suppliers performance matter, but it is the resources of suppliers that are the main competitive advantage and it is in this area where supplier development and sourcing strategies should focus. Due to the strict time frame and limited resources for the research, this research was carried out in the context of SME industry, the research concepts such as SS, Supply chain integration (SCI) and Sourcing performance are relevant to other settings as well (industry and companies). Nevertheless, since the data were collected from a sample of SME industry, it would be interesting to see if similar findings were to be found in other production (commodity) based industries.