A review of the strategic sourcing literature during 1997 2010: trends and emerging issues for research

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to understand the nature of research undertaken in the area of strategic sourcing using a structured framework and use it as a basis for projecting some future areas for research. In this paper, the contributions of the literature are analyzed at two levels; research agenda and data and analysis framework. Using this, the research contributions of 225 papers published over a 14-year time period was assessed and some possible areas for further work identified. Our analysis of the literature points to a few areas of research pertaining to strategic sourcing. There is a need for studying several aspects related to global sourcing. Further, important issues such as reliability of global supply chain networks, development of strategies for responding effectively to major disruptions in the supply network and understanding the behavioral issues related to supply chains are some of the other areas worth researching in the future. Our study also pointed out the need for developing hybrid solution methodologies to improve the solution quality.