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Information systems (IS) outsourcing has been viewed as an attractive option by many senior managers generally because of the belief that IS outsourcing vendors can achieve economies of scale and specialization because their only business is information processing. The challenge of implementing, operating and maintaining enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and the outsourcing service offered by ERP vendors have made ERP outsourcing an attractive option for some organizations. However, although IS outsourcing is now a major industry, the outsourcing of ERP applications is still in its infancy. This paper explores ERP outsourcing in terms of the application service provider (ASP) approach where a third‐party vendor hosts, manages and maintains various data and ERP applications on behalf of different clients. Critical to the management of the ERP outsourcing relationship is the outsourcing contract, which, if improperly or incompletely written, can have significant negative implications for the outsourcing firm. Contracts that encourage vendor performance and discourage under‐performance are therefore clearly of interest to managers. Although many articles have appeared on outsourcing, the issue of incentive contracts for ERP outsourcing has not been adequately addressed by researchers, partly because of the infancy of this area. In this paper, an approach to analyze incentive schemes and structuring ERP outsourcing contracts for the mutual gain of the parties is presented.

Vendor rating is a process having strategic implications for managing a supply chain. Vendor rating can be done using analytic hierarchy process either by a single decision maker or by a group of decision makers. This approach may suffer from some drawbacks including bias in estimation process. A methodology is proposed in this paper which makes use of estimation of the rating by a group on an individual basis following the principle of anonymity. A statistical analysis is carried out to determine the confidence intervals for the estimates of the composite rating of the vendors. The procedure presented here helps in identifying those members whose opinions may significantly deviate from that of the group. Emphasis is placed on establishment of confidence limits in group decision‐making. Participants in group decision making, whose opinions fall outside the group’s confidence limit, are further studied to understand the source of variation. Implementation guidelines have also been provided to account for the dynamic nature of the vendor evaluation process and to take appropriate actions in managing the vendor rating process in the overall supply chain.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the application of vendor rationalization strategy for streamlining the supplies and manufacturing cycle time reduction in an Indian engineer-to-order (ETO) company. ETO firms are known for a large number of vendors, co-ordination hassles, rework problems and its impact on cycle time and operational excellence.

The research demonstrates the case-based application of Kraljic’s matrix for supply and leverages items, on-the-job observations, field visits, discussions and analysis of supplies reports.

The study guides on the rationalization of supplies and the necessary strategic alignments that can significantly reduce supply risk, costs, manufacturing and delivery cycle time along with co-ordination hassles. The study depicts the challenges of ETO environment with respect to supplies, and demonstrates the effectiveness of vendor rationalization application for the case company and weaknesses of commonly practiced vendor management approaches.

To be competitive, companies should rationalize supply items and vendors based on the nature of items and their subsequent usage by applying Kraljic’s matrix-based classification. The immediate implication of vendor rationalization is misunderstood as reducing supply base, but it does much more and includes review of supplies, nature of items and strategic alignments, leading to win-win situation for company and suppliers.

For the rationalization of supplies, while procuring and dealing with vendors, executives should envisage engineering nature of components, considering cross-functional requirements and integration of components in context to ETO products/projects environments. There is a dearth of studies focusing on vendor rationalization aspects in ETO setups in fast-developing country context.

Vendor selection is one of the most important activities of a purchasing department. Traditionally, vendors are selected for their ability to meet the quality requirement, delivery performance and the price offered. However, as they are selected not only to meet the immediate requirement but also future needs, one needs to consider many other factors when selecting a reliable vendor. Analyses some of the most important criteria which have been classified into four categories: autonomous, dependent, linkage and driver depending on their driver power and dependence. Develops an interpretive structural model (ISM) to show the inter‐relationship of different criteria and their levels of importance in the vendor selection process. Reveals that “attitude and willingness for business” and “after sales service” are as important factors as quality, delivery and practice. These criteria are dependent on all the others. This analysis could provide a meaningful analytical base in the vendor selection process.

Benchmarking has long been recognized as an important business activity. The primary goal of benchmarking is to produce a product or execute a process that is at least as good as the best firms producing similar products or performing similar processes. Important components of benchmarking include: determining what to benchmark, identifying the “best of the best”, collecting internal and external data and data associated with the “the best”, and analyzing how a firm can move from its current capability to that of the best. To date, benchmarking has been considered primarily as a producer/vendor based activity. This paper proposes that in many situations benchmarking should be viewed as a customer/purchaser based activity. The primary benefit of purchaser‐originated benchmarking is that it facilitates the collection of competitor's data and allows the customer to determine directly the product/process requirements desired.

One of the essential tasks in implementing JIT is to integrate suppliers in the overall strategy. The process of vendor evaluation and selection is a time‐consuming and critical aspect of establishing vendor partnerships. The various attributes that are important in implementing JIT into the purchasing process are discussed. These attributes are categorised as financial, service, and technical. Several traditional vendor evaluation procedures are examined, their advantages and disadvantages described, and a new dimensional analysis model is introduced. This model has certain advantages over the traditional methods. An illustration of how the model can be used to assist purchasing in the selection of suppliers is given.

Trade credit is treated as a financial intermediation device whereby construction vendors act as financial providers to their customers through deferred payments of goods purchased. The purpose of this paper is to investigate and report upon the key factors and motives influencing vendors' decision on trade credit provision to small to medium sized construction firms.

Adopting deductive methodological approach, this paper utilises a combination of primary data emanating from structured survey questionnaires supplemented by secondary source of data from an extensive literature review, to present insightful commentary about trade credit provision in Ghana. The structured survey questionnaire was administered to 100 construction vendor firms/suppliers to elicit relevant data about their trade credit intentions. Drawing upon the principles of a total design method (TDM) of survey, a relatively high response rate of 57 percent was achieved. Principal component (factor) analysis was adopted to obtain simplification of variables and to detect underlying dimensions and reveal potential complex structures within decision variables.

The underlying constructs and motives of vendors on trade credit were intricately interwoven in two principal factors: risk distribution and liquidity; and sustaining business relationship and liquidity. Despite the uncharacteristic manifestation of the liquidity measure being associated with the two principal components, the findings demonstrate the relative importance of liquidity in the trade credit debate. A critical observation stemming from the analysis was that trade policy was absent within the trade credit market in Ghana; this poses a potential threat to trade credit exchange and its development.

The paper's methodological approach is uniquely positioned between the conceptual and empirical interface and the overarching research is pioneering within the developing world nation of Ghana. The paper's findings will be useful to contractors, particularly, small and medium size contractors who are considering feasible finance options; and vendors who seek to consolidate their clientele base.

Emerging Construction Industry 4.0 technologies raise serious questions for construction companies when deciding whether to adopt or reject emerging technologies. Vendors seek to understand what factors are involved in how construction companies make these decisions and how they might vary across different companies. This paper aims to present a systematic, technology adoption decision-making framework for the construction industry which includes the key steps required for the final decision being made by companies up to the commencement of the operation of the technology.

A total of 123 experienced practitioners were interviewed to identify a broad range of tasks relevant to decision-making. Participants known as customers or vendors were chosen to validate the findings of each group by using data triangulation methods. A systematic thematic analysis method was applied in the NVivo environment to analyse the data.

This study identifies the active role of vendors who need to understand how their customers arrive at decisions to increase the rate of technology adoption. This paper also provides insights to new companies and late adopters (reported greater than 50%) about how others arrived at their decisions.

Unlike other technology adoption models, this paper investigates vendors’ corresponding interactions during the decision-making process. This paper also goes beyond previous studies, which focussed on the individual customer’s intention to use a specific technology at a single-stage by developing a multi-stage framework to enable understanding the details of the decision process at the organisational level.

The determination of quality costs on a production line is discussed. An approach to quality costs analysis is developed and illustrated employing a particular production line. This line which is devoted to the assembly and testing of an advanced computer system is fully described. A diagrammatic model of the production line is presented which displays points on the line at which quality costs can arise and the nature of these costs. A quality cost model for this line incorporating prevention, appraisal and failure cost elements is presented and their estimation discussed. It is argued that the modelling concept developed can provide a general framework for the isolation of quality costs.

This paper has the objective of demonstrating a more structured and useful method for evaluating functionality of enterprise software packages such as supply chain management information systems (SCM IS). Existing taxonomies have limited utility for software selection and analysis due to the variation and overlap in functionality found in modern enterprise systems.

A qualitative analysis of over 1,800 pages of SCM IS documentation and independent analyst reports is used to identify relevant SCM IS functional attributes in the seven most widespread SCM IS packages. Pattern matching and coding of constructs is used to iteratively build a hierarchical taxonomy of SCM IS functionality.

The taxonomy developed describes 83 major functional attributes that form five top‐level categories: primary supply chain processes, data management, decision support, relationship management, and performance improvement. The codes representing supply chain processes agree with the widely used Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) process model, although the terminology was not used consistently in vendor and analyst documents.

The approach described enables richer classification schemes to be built that will better distinguish between the wide‐ranging functionality found in modern enterprise information systems.

Selection and analysis of SCM IS is difficult due to the functional overlaps in different systems. The approach described enables a more structured, detailed, and useful analysis of an organization's current or proposed information systems.

This paper contributes a novel approach for conceptualizing and analyzing complex information systems using hierarchical rather than traditional flat taxonomies.