A Critical Review of Off Shoring Decision Making and Operationality in SMEs

Abstract

In today's global supply chains, which are complex, innovative, and competitive, outsourcing and offshoring have emerged as one of the most important and essential strategic initiatives. Among the long-term business initiatives taken by companies, this is one of the most prominent trends. Despite disagreements about outsourcing's effects on businesses, the practice continues in many companies. Companies of all sizes are increasingly relocating some of their manufacturing and sourcing operations overseas. Despite this, there is a dearth of research that focuses on offshoringdecision-makingprocedure as pertains to Small Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). We surveyed French SMEs to learn how company size affects the outsourcing process, and we found that SMEs offshore a comparable share of procurement to larger organizations, though they tend to focus on fewer countries. We also showed that smaller businesses are not as well-equipped to make informed decisions about offshoring as larger ones are because they have less information about foreign countries.