Towards model-based strategic sourcing

Strategic sourcing recognizes that procurement is not just a cost function, but supports the firm's effort to achieve its long-term objectives. Strategic sourcing has become a critical area of strategic management that is centered on decision-making regarding an organization's procurement activities such as spend analysis, capability sourcing, supplier selection and evaluation, contract management and relationship management. Many companies face challenges in obtaining the benefits associated with effective strategic sourcing. From an organizational perspective, procurement data management is a core organizational challenge for chief procurement officers (CPOs) for fact-based strategic sourcing decision-making. To address this challenge, we define research objectives to design a holistic view on strategic sourcing orientations and to develop a conceptual basis for enabling centralization of procurement data and enabling the systemic exploration of sourcing alternatives. From a service ecosystem perspective as a holistic view on strategic sourcing, we define a model driven approach to explore sourcing alternatives based on a common language (C.A.R.S) that enables companies to achieve procurement data management and analytics competencies for fact-based decision-making