Total Landed Cost for international sourcing decisions

The Total Landed Cost (TLC) often comprise a large share of the total international sourcing cost and thereby determine the cost-saving potential. Therefore, the literature proposes a number of methods to evaluate the TLC. Nevertheless, the ordinary way and especially the usage of information systems (IS) have not been examined satisfactory. This study focusses which kind of IS are used in this domain and how they perform. As a result, more than one-half of survey respondents are not using IS, although IS lead to a significantly higher perceived performance. An Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) indicates that non-enterprise resource planning systems (non-ERP) reached a higher performance in comparison to ERP, especially because of the flexibility of the cost calculation. Based on the research results, the authors discuss some useful implications.