Firms compete on value, not cost alone. However, sourcing decisions are often heavily weighted towards minimizing costs, even though these decisions also can affect revenue, risk, and other stakeholder values. To address this disconnect, we introduce a new approach to strategic sourcing, “total value contribution” (TVC). The TVC name by itself promotes attention to value. TVC's structured approach begins with the question: “what do our customers, current and future, value about our products?” The TVC approach builds on insights from the literature on individual and group decision‐making to offset human biases and organizational incentives that emphasize cost reduction. TVC builds on gains already achieved by “total cost of ownership” (TCO) sourcing methods, which broadened the list of factors considered in sourcing. We provide examples of TVC‐like thinking in real organizations and argue that such thinking would be more common with the dissemination of TVC. We also provide access to a version of this JOM Forum piece suitable to assign to students, and discuss a new teaching note which describes how to implement TVC in a popular strategic sourcing teaching case. We believe widespread implementation of TVC would improve both organizational and social outcomes.

Supply chain problems referenced in peer-reviewed journals and selected management magazines were collected, with information about the journal, the resource affected, the cause of the problem, the solution(s) applied, and the firm(s) involved. Keywords were used to group these problems into naturally occurring categories. Nine types of supply chain problems were identified: conflict, delays, demand fluctuations, excess/unused resources, inaccuracy, insufficient resources, long tail, pricing, and security. These categories together present a comprehensive view of problems that typically affect different resources within the supply chain, and can be used to diagnose problems and to evaluate solutions.

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