| Today's global competition for raw materials, equipment, services, and the legislated rules of the Sarbranes Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) require organizations to provide policies and procedures for strategic sourcing supplier selection that both abide by SOX laws and deliver value to organizational stakeholders. This mandate, as well as the need for an increasingly strategic focus of corporate supply chain management departments, provides the basis for the current study. This study was completed using the Delphi Method and used three iterative phases of individual face-to-face interviews to identify and define the metrics that buyers, suppliers, and end-users at the participant company believed should be used for supplier selection. Participants also assigned a measure of metric consensus as to the importance of the metric and its corresponding definitional dimensions. Results of this study identified metrics and their underlying definitional dimensions that can be used in selecting suppliers for both a capital equipment shearing machine and MRO roof control products. While initial phases found that there was a great deal of differences in the metric definitional dimensions, additional iterations of the Delphi Method allowed for buyers, suppliers, and end-users to reach a consensus on the metrics, their definitions, and their importance to the evaluation. These differences indicate the importance of having a procedure in place for identifying metrics and definitions in selecting suppliers for strategic sourcing. Additionally, the process by which a consensus was reached established itself as a solid method for coming to consensus on these metrics. Future research should explore alternate ways of completing such a process, the lack of agreement between various groups, and use of the Delphi Method with different industries to identify if similar group disparities exist in other areas. |
