Empirical study of supplier selection strategies across the supply chain management in manufacturing companies

Supply chain management has seen a wide application by enterprises since 1990s in globalized manufacturing and in satisfying various kinds of customer demands. To remain competitive on a global scale, companies greatly increased the scope of their outsourcing activities and are now heavily relying on supplier selection strategies. Therefore, the selection process became a high priority activity with major significance to companies. Previous studies of supplier selection show that there are commonly accepted criteria when selecting suppliers. However, the criteria did not consider external factors such as the national background that a company operates in. Evolution of selection priorities was not studied either in previous studies. This paper compare different considerations of supplier selection strategies (SSS) in different national background. We testify the change of companies´ SSS in priority over time to be in compliance with the change of competitive priorities. The impact of Internet utilization extent on SSS was studied.