Now in its third edition, this is the only outsourcing and offshoring book to offer a broad but coherent guide to the strategy, operations and management of ITO and BPO outsourcing and offshoring, from how to source new relationships to managing business processes in a national and global context.

Now in its third edition, this is the only outsourcing and offshoring book to offer a broad but coherent guide to the strategy, operations and management of ITO and BPO outsourcing and offshoring, from how to source new relationships to managing business processes in a national and global context.

Global sourcing is a complex area, and one that managers must get to grips with as business investment in outsourcing continues to climb. This book provides invaluable guidance for the reader, walking them through the fundamentals of global sourcing to very recent trends, including intelligent automation, cloud services and crowdsourcing. Replete with key examples and cases, it allows students and managers alike to relate academic theory to practice, acting as a roadmap to a rapidly evolving field. For the last decade, the authors have studied the full spectrum of activities involved in global sourcing from both client, supplier and advisory viewpoints. Their research has shown that while more firms engage in global sourcing activities, many of them are still struggling to extract value from sourcing relationships. While past research has produced numerous practical frameworks regarding the management of global sourcing of services, little of this insight has been put into practice. This book addresses such shortcomings by exploring the impact of theory on practice. It is important reading for any academic, student or practitioner concerned with global sourcing either from the client or supplier perspective.

This book offers a broad perspective on issues relating to the sourcing of systems and business processes in a national and global context, examining the client's and the vendor's involvement in sourcing relationships by putting the emphasis on the capabilities that each side should develop as a result of their interactions with each other.

"Impressive... This is an evidence-based bottom-up account of the realities of globalisation. It is more varied, more subtle, and more substantial than many of the popular works available on the subject." -- Financial Times Based on a five-year study by the MIT Industrial Performance Center, How We Compete goes into the trenches of over 500 international companies to discover which practices are succeeding in today’s global economy, which are failing –and why. There is a rising fear in America that no job is safe. In industry after industry, jobs seem to be moving to low-wage countries in Asia, Central America, and Eastern Europe. Production once handled entirely in U.S. factories is now broken into pieces and farmed out to locations around the world. To discover whether our current fears about globalization are justified, Suzanne Berger and a group of MIT researchers went to the front lines, visiting workplaces and factories around the world. They conducted interviews with managers at more than 500 companies, asking questions about which parts of the manufacturing process are carried out in their own plants and which are outsourced, who their biggest competitors are, and how they plan to grow their businesses. How We Compete presents their fascinating, and often surprising, conclusions. Berger and her team examined businesses where technology changes rapidly–such as electronics and software–as well as more traditional sectors, like the automobile industry, clothing, and textile industries. They compared the strategies and success of high-tech companies like Intel and Sony, who manufacture their products in their own plants, and Cisco and Dell, who rely primarily on outsourcing. They looked closely at textile and clothing to uncover why some companies, including the Gap and Liz Claiborne, choose to outsource production to foreign countries, while others, such as Zara and Benetton, base most operations at home. What emerged was far more complicated than the black-and-white picture presented by promoters and opponents of globalization. Contrary to popular belief, cheap labor is not the answer, and the world is not flat, as Thomas Friedman would have it. How We Compete shows that there are many different ways to win in the global economy, and that the avenues open to American companies are much wider than we ever imagined. SUZANNE BERGER is the Raphael Dorman and Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science at MIT and director of the MIT International Science and Technology Initiative. She was a member of the MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity, whose report Made in America analyzed weaknesses and strengths in U.S. industry in the 1980s. She lives in Boston , Massachusetts.

Companies are increasingly asking which of their value chain activities are best performed within their own company and which may be outsourced. In addition, they are also considering which pieces of their value chain may be better performed abroad. These interrelated decisions concerning outsourcing and offshoring have not only changed entire industries, they have also transformed the lives of people across the world. Hundreds of millions of jobs in emerging nations have been the direct result of outsourcing and offshoring decisions. At the same time, many people in the developed world have lost their jobs because a company has been able to find a cheaper alternative. Featuring contributions from scholars in eleven different countries, this book was the first to examine the theory and practice of outsourcing and offshoring simultaneously. It includes studies of a variety of different industries, including pharmaceuticals, automobiles, medical records, appliances, human resource management and telecommunications.

Since 2007, South Africa has been one of the world's upcoming Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) offshore destinations. This book is based on the authors' most recent research into high performance BPO globally and new research streams specifically on South Africa.