Sourcing from emerging nations: Issues and opportunities for supply chain management.

摘要

The importance of overseas sourcing in the achievement of better results in the purchasing function and in overall business performance has been widely investigated since the late 1980s. Increasingly, U.S. manufacturing firms have turned toward less developed countries (LDCs) to derive benefits from LDCs’ lower costs of products and services. These supply chain benefits must, however, be weighted against the possible negative supply chain impacts of, for example, more fragmented transportation and logistics infrastructure, and more limited information technology capabilities of LDC firms. However, few extant studies have addressed the logistics and supply chain implications of sourcing from LDCs.;The purpose of the current study is to provide an understanding of key sourcing issues when a firm sources from LDCs, and to explore the relationship of the issues with the firm’s supply chain performance. A self-administered mail questionnaire was used to collect data from purchasing managers of U.S. manufacturing firms that directly source from both developed and less developed countries. Multivariate statistics methods were utilized to identify key issues of sourcing from LDCs in comparison to sourcing from developed countries, and to identify issues with strong relationships with the buying firm’s supply chain performance.;The results show that sellers in developed countries perform more satisfactorily than those in LDCs in all aspect of sourcing and supply chain operations, except for product price. However, issues with larger satisfaction gaps by no means suggest a higher priority for improvement. Instead, the priority areas for improvement should be incorporated with the degree of impacts improving a certain area can have on the firms supply chain performance. Among non-supply chain aspects of interest, strong relationships were found between environmental variables (e.g., access to communication infrastructure and business practices) and suppliers’ capability issues (e.g., suppliers production capabilities) and a buying firm’s supply chain performance. The findings provide information and impartial guidelines for supply chain managers prioritizing supply chain corrective actions with respect to developing capabilities in LDCs and allocating the firm’s resources to the most pressing issues and actions ranking highest in payoff. Future research agenda is delineated stemming from the bounds of this work.