Strategic sourcing, including early supplier involvement and outsourcing, provides significant competitive advantage to companies and represents a fundamental change in the way firms drive the bottom line.

With this issue Knowledge@ W. P. Carey inaugurates a series of stories about the benchmark reports issued by CAPS Research, a research center co-sponsored by the W. P. Carey School of Business and the Institute of Supply Management.

After watching dozens of chief purchasing officers come and go as the leaders of supply chain operations in 30 of the world's largest companies, researchers came to a simple conclusion: The CPO's chair has become a true corporate hot seat.

Across virtually all industries and geographic regions, manufacturers share one common goal: to increase profitability by decreasing costs.

Online retailers seek logistics service providers offering high-quality supply chain management knowledge. But new research by supply chain management professor Elliot Rabinovich shows retailers need to look before they leap into a contract with a provider.

Finding the optimal number of suppliers to form your supply base is not easy — nor is it the only factor buying companies must juggle in order to manage their suppliers effectively.

Like a physical supply chain, an information supply chain (ISC) is comprised of the organizations that connect with each other to produce a desired end — product or service — for a user.

Manufacturers have learned to work closely with their suppliers to decrease costs and reduce time to market, but focusing on buyer-supplier relationships may no longer be enough to achieve competitive advantage.

How do you know which hospitals are doing the best job? Patients, insurers and employers all have a stake in the answer to this question, but up until now factual information on hospital and nursing home performance has been scanty, and what is out there is based on differing criteria.

American consumers pay top dollar for medications they assume are pure and unadulturated. But we don't always get what we pay for, according to researchers who are sounding the alarm about the growing presence of counterfeit drugs in the marketplace.