Development of a methodology to improve the sourcing process

Companies have to satisfy a multitude of needs to thrive. Conflicts between targets have to be considered in order to maximize the companies¿ market value. Therefore decision makers have to periodically answer questions regarding the companies¿ performance in comparison to competitors and have to identify the part of their company in which strategic measures will exhibit the greatest impact on market value. Another strategic decision is to determine the measures to be implemented and how these will affect their companies¿ market value. Some methods existing today offer useful input to resolve this decision problem or at least parts thereof. Nevertheless several consulting projects for German companies completed by the authors ascertained demand for an easy to use decision support system which targets this optimization problem. This paper describes an easy to use decision support system for sourcing, which was successfully applied to resolve this problem, using an adaptation of SCOR as a basis. Ongoing research work to enhance this tool is described.