Outsourcing design and engineering tasks in product development is increasingly popular. However, firms that outsource design and engineering tasks often experience problems. So far, no satisfactory answer exists regarding the question to what extent design and engineering tasks can be outsourced before negative consequences occur. We address this gap. This paper identifies the limits of design and engineering outsourcing in product development, and the sources of these limits. To do so, it investigates the organizational challenges that a major European automotive manufacturer faced when it decided to adopt an extreme form of design and engineering outsourcing. Based on an in‐depth case study, we identify the sources of problems with outsourcing design and engineering tasks in product development, and shed light on the limits of design and engineering outsourcing in product development.
The nature of buyer‐supplier relationships has been closely linked to nation specific explanations and concern has been expressed in literature regarding the transferability of co‐design best practices to different firms and countries. On the other hand, many attempts to isolate best practices and to apply them on a global scale have been proposed in the literature. Contributes to the issue by analysing a controversial case study based on the Italian automotive industry. Results show that few aspects of the Japanese contextual features and American ones existed when the major Italian car maker decided to outsource component design and dramatically change its supply chain management approach. Moreover, despite the massive involvement of suppliers at a very early stage of the car maker new product development process, not all the best practices deemed to be necessary when implementing a co‐operative buyer‐supplier relationship have been applied. Argues that these results lead us to question the very nature of effective buyer‐supplier relationships as described by the dominant literature and suggests implications for practitioners and for future research.
In the last two decad es, the au to industr y has shown a steady increase of vehicle development outsourcing and a shift of both pr oduct developm ent tasks and knowledge from car makers to suppliers. This trend has increased the interest toward product m odularity as a tool to suggest that they may work as substitutes and are rather difficult to combine.
The concept of organizational routine can foster our understanding of the behaviour of organizations and of organizational change (Nelson and Winter 1982, March and Simon 1958, Cyert and March 1963, but since empirical studies employing organizational routines as analytical perspective are still relatively rare, how to conduct such an analysis and what are its benefits is not yet fully evident. We wish to shed light on how employing routines contributes to understanding the behavior of organizations and to demonstrate the potential of such analysis. The empirical analysis of the product development process at an engineering centre shows that using organizational routines presents advantages over alternative analytical approaches. The paper also contributes to shed light on how to fruitfully employ an organizational routines perspective in analysing the behaviour of organizations, providing the foundation for further empirical work. carried out in organizations is accomplished in routinized ways. Thus, its routines can be considered 'typical' for an organization. In order to understand an organization and its behavior, analysing its routines thus seems an appropriate starting point since they capture systematic and endogenous (rather than exogenous or one-off) performance drivers.Moreover, routines play an important role in organizational learning and memory, and is yet not fully evident, mainly due to a lack of empirical studies.While previous empirical studies employing an organizational routines approach have tackled specific research questions about organizations, we explore how using the analytical perspective of organizational routines contributes to understanding the behaviour of organizations and show how to carry out such an analysis, thus closing a gap in the literature.The paper is structured as follows. It first briefly introduces the notion of organizational routines. The case study is presented in section three. Section four explores the contribution of organizational routines in explaining the behavior of organizations, thus answering the research question. Section five presents conclusions. Organizational routinesPage 5 of 37 Note that rules do not necessarily, however, fully specify the causal mechanism, that is, precisely how rules contribute to generating recurrent patterns of behavior. As Feldman andPentland (2003) have recently argued, the role of human agency in rule-following, and probably also the governance mechanisms that provide incentives and constraints for following rules would at least need to be considered.(iii) Some recent articles argue that organizational routines should be understood as dispositions to engage in previously adopted or acquired behavior, triggered by an appropriate stimulus or context Knudsen 2004a and2004b). Rather than patterns of behavior, routines are 'stored behavioral capacities or capabilities. These capacities involve knowledge and memory. They involve organisational structures and individual habits which, when triggered, lead to sequential behavi...
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