The rules of global manufacturing are being rewritten in real time. Geopolitical tensions are redrawing supply maps overnight. Sustainability requirements are forcing companies to rethink who they work with and where. Logistics disruptions that were once rare exceptions have become a permanent feature of the operating environment. And through all of it, one question keeps surfacing in boardrooms and operations meetings around the world: what should we still be doing ourselves and what should we hand to someone else?

Make-or-buy decisions have always been among the most consequential choices a company makes. Get them right and you build a leaner, more resilient operation focused on what you are genuinely best at. Get them wrong and you hand away capabilities you cannot easily rebuild, or you carry internal costs that erode your competitiveness year after year. In a stable world, these decisions could be revisited every few years. In the world that exists today, they need to be revisited continuously and most companies have no structured way to do that.

That is the gap this thesis addresses. Through a combination of literature review, real-world case studies and simulation, the research develops a practical decision-support framework that gives managers a systematic way to evaluate make-or-buy alternatives, not just for products and components, but for processes, capabilities, technologies and know-how. The framework integrates both operational and strategic criteria, designed to hold up not just in stable conditions but precisely when supply chain conditions are shifting fastest.

If you are drawn to research that sits at the intersection of operations strategy and real-world turbulence, where the frameworks you build could change how a company decides what it fundamentally is, this is the thesis for you.