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Supplier Selection

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The Process of Supplier Selection 1 Introduction In today’s competitive society more and more businesses are realizing the impact purchasing has on their profit (van Weele, 2005:XV). According to van Weele (2005:4) “most companies today spend more than half of their sales turnover on purchased parts and services”. As this is a shocking amount, it is not surprising companies have special purchasing departments to handle this crucial and often complicated process. One of the most important and challenging steps of the purchasing process is the selection of suppliers. Therefore there are lots of studies and literature dealing with finding the right supplier for your distinctive products/services and needs. 1.1 The problem field The …show more content…

At this stage it is also worth to think about whether to make or buy (van Weele, 2005:47). Gadde and Håkansson (2001:119) also talks about this in the terms of whether to handle in-house or to outsource to suppliers. This is something the company has to decide as producing can be cheaper but outsourcing can give better flexibility and less money for research and development. As this paper deals with supplier selection, it will not deal with this subject further, but assume that this choice has already been made. 2.2 How to outsource After analyzing the need and deciding to outsource the production, the company needs to determine whether to use single sourcing or multiple sourcing (Ghodsypour and O’Brien, 2001). This is also argued by van Weele (2005:49) who talks about turnkey and partial outsourcing. Further on the terms used are single and multiple sourcing. In single sourcing the company believes that their entire demand can be met by one single supplier and they simply have to choose the best one (Cho and Ting, 2008:117). In multiple sourcing the company assumes that one supplier can’t meet all requirements and they therefore need to have many suppliers fulfilling each other’s shortages (Cho and Ting, 2008:117). Besides these two strategies there are dual and parallel sourcing (power point presentation lecture 25.9.2009). Dual sourcing is when you have two suppliers delivering the same product and parallel sourcing is when one supplier delivers product X,

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