HBR Case Study. Grant Newman, chief executive officer of Regional Medical Center, decided to out source RMC's anesthesia services and signed a contract with Physicians Development Services, a contract management company. PDS had seemed a good fit.

Do Rewards Really Create Loyalty?" Louise O'Brien and Charles Jones argue that they do, but only if a company learns how to share value with its most profitable customers in proportion to the value the customers' loyalty creates for the company.

In 1993, BP Exploration Operating Company Limited, the $13 billion division of British Petroleum Company that explores for and produces oil and gas, outsourced all its information technology operations in an effort to cut costs, gain more flexible and higher-quality IT resources, and refocus the IT department on activities that directly improve the overall business.