The current issue presents four research papers which have implications for both researchers and practitioners. Three of the papers focus on the Indian context, bringing greater insights for different business sectors in India such as healthcare, public service delivery system and automobile sector. The first paper, “Examining the Efficiency of Outsourcing in India’s Healthcare Sector Using Data Envelopment Analysis”, by Debraj Mishra and D K Mahalik, highlights the importance of outsourcing across different sectors of industry in general and healthcare in particular. The authors state that outsourcing is a global phenomenon not only to remain competitive but also to survive in the fast changing environment. They make an attempt to identify the current practice of outsourcing in healthcare sector and measure the performance of these outsourcing activities through benchmarking, using conventional Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). They state that financial pressures like reduced reimbursements by the payers, rise in input cost and lower payment by the patients are forcing many healthcare organizations to opt for outsourcing. Despite the pervasiveness of outsourcing activities, it is very difficult to closely measure the benefit of outsourcing, particularly in healthcare, as it is not easy to quantify the benefit. This study considered 21 hospitals from India which are using outsourcing for carrying out their day-to-day activities and identified ten most outsourced services. These services are security, laundry, food supply, housekeeping, medicine, doctor, nurse, pathology, medical services and administration. The study reveals that ‘housekeeping services’ is the most preferred outsourcing service. The result shows that there is no agreement on the outsourcing decision. The study also reveals that hospitals managing their services through outsourcing score better in terms of efficiency than their counterparts who manage their services in-house. Thus, the study concludes that organizations doing non-core activities through outsourcing are better placed than their competitors. Further, outsourcing leads to more customer satisfaction and management satisfaction, leading to better financial outcome.

The second paper, “Strategic Alliance Trends in the Spanish Food and Beverage Industry”, by Jesús Morcillo-Bellido, highlights the importance of specific alliance capabilities to develop successful partnership. Alliances have been used as an important tool to support corporate strategic objectives, especially when companies face difficulties in entering new businesses, or when they need to improve their customer service. Despite the pervasiveness of alliance, more than half of alliances fail, and this is considered as a serious management issue. Hence, the current study analyzes alliance practices in a sample of companies that belong to the Spanish Food & Beverage (F&B) industry and compares their alliance practices with those developed by a group of companies considered as ‘Best in Class’ in partnership management. This ‘excellent group’ has worked out a set of ‘alliance key success factors’ to improve the success rate in their relationships. The study has considered two different periods, 2009 and 2017, to check if within the Spanish F&B there is a trend to adopt some alliance success practices.

The third paper, “Redesigning Public Services Delivery: A Comparative Study of Delivery of Manual Conventional Public Services and Delivery of Public E-Services”, by Vipin Dalal and Sunil Sharma, highlights the need for a high level of e-services development and corresponding agility in the public services delivery systems in India. Public e-services delivery systems are used by the governments at the center and states, resulting in e-government to benefit people in local setting in its own unique way so that citizens’ demands are met and fulfilled, instead of the government dictating to citizens. Running public e-services is more cost-efficient than providing manual public services to the citizens. Delivery of e-services through e-governance provides a fertile ground for transparent, efficient and trustworthy governance. The literature review shows that manual public services delivery is full of social division and is a playground for corrupt people and practices. Hence, there is a need for an empirical exploration to assess and compare the perceptions of users towards delivery of manual conventional public services and delivery of public e-services. This paper therefore assesses and compares the delivery of manual conventional public services and the delivery of public e-services. The data was collected from 400 respondents who had used both the conventional manual public service delivery systems and public e-services delivery systems, which resulted in 350 usable responses. Paired sample t-test was used to test the hypotheses. The finding of the study suggested that public e-service delivery system is better than conventional manual public delivery system in terms of reliability, quality, flexibility and transparency.

The fourth paper, “The Impact of Supply Chain Strategy and Supply Chain Flexibility on Supply Chain Performance: A Study in the Indian Context”, by Amit Chandak, Sumit Chandak and A Dalpati, investigates the impact of supply chain practices, viz., Supply Chain Strategy (SCS) and Supply Chain Flexibility (SCF), on Supply Chain Performance (SCP). The study considers different dimensions of SCS and SCF and empirically examines the relationship of these dimensions to SCP. The hypothesized relationships are tested on a sample of 121 firms from automobile industry in India. The responses are obtained on a five-point Likert scale. The path modeling approach is used to test the hypothesized relationship between the constructs of interest. The findings suggest that the dimensions of SCS and SCF are positively related to SCP. This study contributes new knowledge to the existing literature by providing a research framework that can enhance the performance of the Indian automobile industry, and gives practical recommendations based on the research findings.