| Product development and engineering managers have increasingly used various combinations of outsourcing, offshoring, and nearshoring as a means to positively affect cost, project completion time, and design quality. Yet, these managers may not fully understand if the outsourcing or offshoring strategies used to improve these triad of project management factors have positively affected one or more of these three factors. Consequently, managers relying on their own intuition may not have implemented the right outsourcing strategy or made the right decisions pertaining to outsourcing and offshoring. Using all complete survey responses (n = 138) obtained from a sample group of N = 1721 individuals randomly selected from the 2007 Power-Gen show guide, Association of Equipment Manufacturer member list, and supplier lists for products associated with the power and construction industries, the results of summated scores were analyzed to determine if a relationship exists between domestic or global outsourcing and perceived cost savings, project quality, or project completion time. Although the non-parametric Wilcoxon test of the median results applicable to factors relating cost to global or domestic outsourcing were not significant (p > 0.05), results indicated that factors relating quality to global and domestic outsourcing were significant (p < 0.05). In addition, factors relating project completion time to global outsourcing were significant. Therefore, the results showed that neither domestic nor global outsourcing delivers perceived cost savings. However, there was evidence to suggest the use of either global or domestic outsourcing had a negative impact on the perceived quality of the designs. Global outsourcing also had a negative effect on the perceived project completion time. Using non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance by ranks, testing revealed that perceived cost, quality, or project completion time was not affected by which engineering function was outsourced. Findings within this study may give managers involved in engineering design or development insight to make appropriate decisions surrounding outsourcing and offshoring strategies. Expanding this study to assess the use of outsourcing and offshoring for aerospace engineering, computer manufacturing, and consumer electronics industries would better depict how all engineering projects are affected by the use of outsourced and offshore engineering resources. |
