Outsourcing model city selection in China from the offshore outsourcer's perspective based on the additive SE-DEA model

More and more enterprises are outsourcing activities that are neither cost efficient if done in-house nor central to their businesses. Most of the studies in outsourcing decision making focus on vendor selection. However, little research has been done about location selection, which is also a critical step in offshore service outsourcing. The purpose of this paper is to offer a new method to deal with the destination selection problem in China. We employed the additive SE-DEA model to overcome the drawbacks of traditional DEA and SE-DEA methods, and calculated the relative efficiency of 20 service outsourcing model cities(excluding Xiamen). Based on two years of longitudinal study, we made a comparison of the 20 cities. Finally we classified the model cities by combining them with the service outsourcing ability dimension and also gave some selection suggestions and development suggestions for outsourcers’ outsourcing service and the model cities, respectively.