This paper reports on a benchmarking study carried out on supply chain management (SCM) activities of manufacturing organisations in New Zealand. The purpose of the paper is to report the current state of the play in this area. A postal survey was carried out to ascertain the status of SCM adoption in New Zealand, and identify the issues in SCM that are significant for New Zealand manufacturers. The findings suggest that although there is awareness of the SCM concept in New Zealand, the adoption of the newer concepts of SCM is not very far advanced.
PurposeInternal supply chain refers to the chain of activities within a company that concludes with providing a product to the customer. This process involves multiple functions within companies such as sales, production, and distribution. It is obvious that a company's performance would be enhanced by the integration of these functions. However, there is no consensus yet on how integration is to be defined and measured. The purpose of this paper is to present research that was conducted with the goal of developing an instrument for the measurement of internal supply chain integration.Design/methodology/approachScale items were identified from current literature and the resulting survey instrument was sent out to a sample of New Zealand manufacturers. Statistical analysis was conducted to purify and validate the instrument.FindingsIn total, three dimensions of integration were identified, labelled coordination, communication, and affective relationship. This paper makes a contribution towards developing a consensus in the understanding and measurement of the integration construct.Research limitations/implicationsThe selection and exclusion of measurement items for the survey have followed established principles of survey research, but may have been affected by the personal bias of the author. While every attempt has been made to comprehensively capture the state of the research up to the time of the study, there may be some omissions. The sample for the survey was drawn from a database of New Zealand businesses, thus the results are generalizable only to the extent that these businesses represent the population of all businesses. Another limitation is that no prior survey/case studies were carried out to collect practitioner's definitions/measures for integration.Practical implicationsThe authors hope to have made a contribution here towards building a consensus among practitioners and researchers in defining and measuring internal supply chain integration. For practitioners, the measurement instrument offers a self‐assessment tool for internal supply chain integration. This should help them in identifying areas for improvement.Originality/valueThe contribution of this paper consists of: development of an instrument for the measurement of integration, validating the instrument against a criterion, and the identification of three dimensions of integration – communication, coordination, and affective relationship. The unique contributions of this paper are the validation of the instrument against a criterion and the identification of “affective relationship” as a dimension of internal supply chain integration.
A firm's internal supply chain refers to the specific value-creating functions within the organisation, such as production, sales and distribution. Previous research has shown that these functions need to work together to achieve high levels of firm performance. However, the means to achieve this integration of internal supply chain functions have not received much attention in the current literature. In this paper, we review the published literature on internal supply chain integration and report on empirical research, which we conducted to test various antecedents of integration. Results from our survey indicate that line managers are able to improve functional integration by fostering a positive attitude towards other departments. Integration appears also to be enhanced by making departments jointly accountable for achieving company goals.
This paper presents a review of the research literature on supply chain strategies linked to product demand. Fisher (1997), in his seminal article, has argued that efficient supply chain (SC) strategies are appropriate for functional products and responsive strategies are needed for innovative products. The purpose of this article is to review articles which have been published after Fisher (1997), and which relate market demand for a product to the respective supply chain design, in an effort to synthesise these articles and suggest future research directions. A literature review is carried out using content analysis, following the qualitative research paradigm. Both deductive and inductive coding has been carried out, followed by a descriptive analysis and a synthesis of the literature. The contribution of the article is a critical review, a synthesis of the literature, and directions for future research.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.