Effect Of Supply Chain Management Practices In A Case Study Of Dire Dawa Food Complex Share Company In Dire Dawa Town, Ethiopia

Abstract

Supply chain management is the means by which firms engaged in creating, distributing and selling products, can join forces to establish a supply network with an unbeatable competitive advantage has emerged as one of the most powerful business improvement tools around. Companies all over the world are pursuing supply chain as the latest methodology to reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction, better utilize assets, and build new revenues. The purpose of this paper is to study the practices of supply chain management from the five Supply chain management practice perspectives i.e. Supplier and customer relationship, internal operations, information sharing, information technology and training and to see the integrations among Supply chain partners. For the accomplishment of this, the study was employed through descriptive design in which the selections of the respondents were carried out by using judgmental, purposive and convenience sampling techniques. The total numbers of Dire Dawa food complex share company employees are 336. Out of this about 120 employees are not educated. Therefore, the target was 216. From this target population, 32 respondents were considered as a sample size. Both primary and secondary sources of data were used for this study. 5-Likert scaled questionnaire and interviews were used as instruments for data collection. The data was analyzed by using descriptive statistics and presented in tables with mean and standard deviation. The major findings indicate that, most Supply chain management practices are moderately practiced with in the Dire Dawa food complex share company. Whereas IT and training practices are poorly applied and sales forecast information sharing with customers is poor. Based on both quantitative and qualitative analysis the case company has poor relationship with its customers and suppliers and poor customer’s services. Manufacturing, supply and demand uncertainties are the major challenges of the case company’s Supply chain which prohibits effective implementation of Supply chain management