Determinants of sourcing decision of supply chain: an application in Iranian SMES

Outsourcing is one of the most popular business strategies in the globalisation era. Outsourcing can bring considerable benefits to organisations. However, if outsourcing decisions are not wisely made and the factors influencing the decision on outsourcing are not carefully considered, this could incur irreparable damage to organisation. This study seeks to identify and rank the factors affecting the outsourcing from the strategic perspective in the supply chain of small and medium manufacturing enterprises. In this study, after determining the factors influencing the strategic outsourcing decisions based on the literature, seven major factors were evaluated. In this approach, the estimation of the parameters using factor analysis was conducted to determine the most important sub-indices. Then, due to the multidimensional nature of the factors, the analytic hierarchy process technique was used for the weighting of the factors and the fuzzy additive ratio assessment technique was used for ranking the sub-criteria influencing the decisions of strategic outsourcing. The results showed that the quality is the most important factor and the management agent has the least importance.