In the twenty-first century, globalisation is changing and widening the basis of competition. The trend in international outsourcing continues to grow, both in the number and value of transactions, as well as the variety of services outsourced. International outsourcing has been emerged as an important solution to improve the supply chain and achieve comparative advantages. More SMEs are involved with the outsourcing strategy now. Key to the planning and deploying a successful international outsourcing project is the methodology throughout the project lifecycle. For SMEs in particular, they need a practical framework to sustain success. This research gives new insight into how outsourcing delivers supply chain integration in the global context and proposes a framework for SMEs to facilitate their outsourcing planning and deployment, in particular for the aerospace manufacturers. The literature investigated considers the areas of supply chain management, SMEs and outsourcing strategy. This identifies the research gap between the existing literature and the practical demand from SMEs, therefore the necessity of this research has been shown. Action research is an important part of the research methodology, as well as case study because the framework is formulated via literature and a case study, then further developed and improved by two case studies. The outputs from the research activities provide the foundation for the framework. The proposed framework contains a workbook which configures SMEs' requirements and describes the necessary stages and steps in the outsourcing process. Industrial case studies are applied to develop, deduce and demonstrate the proposed framework. The future work is planned to enhance the performance of the outsourcing applications.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:502245 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Zhang, Yan |
| Publisher | University of Liverpool |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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