پیامدهای برون سپاری فرایندهای خدمات بر ارزش شرکت

Outsourcing is one of the important strategies acknowledged by firms recently. With an increase in globalization and the proliferation of information technology, more and more firms outsource not only their production but also their service processes including back office business processes and information technology functions to external suppliers. Recognizing the criticality of outsourcing service processes in marketing management, the authors build on the outsourcing literature and integrate it with the finance literature on market efficiency to develop a conceptual framework. The authors collect outsourcing announcements from the Wall Street Journal and business news available at Lexis-Nexis between 1995 and 2005 to conduct an event analysis. Results indicate that outsourcing in general creates positive firm value, i.e., cumulative abnormal returns; however, such effects vary depending upon different levels and dimensions of an outsourcing decision. The authors conclude with managerial implications and future research at the end.

Because of its tremendous financial and strategic implications, outsourcing has become one of the important business strategies in the last two decades. Previous research defines outsourcing as a firm's strategic decisions to rely on external suppliers as alternative to make business activities in-house (Harris et al., 1998 and Loh and Venkatraman, 1992). With the proliferation of information technology and ever soaring competition, we have observed that after the first wave of outsourcing with a primary emphasis on manufacturing activities in the 80s and 90s, more firms have begun to outsource service processes including information technology (e.g., data management) and business processes (e.g., human resources management), resulting in the second wave of outsourcing (Kingson, 2002, Mears, 2003 and Schmerken and Golden, 1996), which is the focus of this research. Despite recent rush in outsourcing service processes, its advantages and disadvantages brought to firms are increasingly debatable across industries (Kotabe et al., 2008 and Pyndt and Pedersen, 2006). Some studies show that outsourcing allows a firm to not only cut costs, but also focus on its core competences and help speed up its innovation processes (e.g., Florin et al., 2005 and Graf and Mudambi, 2005). In contrast, other research suggests that a firm that engages in outsourcing may lose control and flexibility, and potentially risk disclosure of proprietary knowledge to suppliers, who may become its competitors in the future (Harris et al., 1998).

Different from the vast of outsourcing studies, this research builds on the dynamic perspective (Kotabe et al., 2008) to explain under what conditions outsourcing can create value to firms. As Venkatraman (1997: 60) has pointed out, “the question is not whether to outsource but what to outsource.” While in this study, we have addressed not only the question of whether to outsource and what to outsource but also for how long and where to outsource. Below we discuss the implications of findings to managers and provide directions for future research.