The use of total cost of ownership for strategic procurement: a company-wide management information system

We present a general company-wide management information system for defining procurement strategies. We believe that existing practices for determining purchasing strategies can be improved and a new approach developed. The system uses total cost of ownership information. We argue that mathematical programming models should be used for exploiting this information, when evaluating the firm's strategic procurement options. As an example, we show how we have successfully applied our approach to develop a decision support system at Usinor, a European multinational steel company.