Investigation of the effects of supply chain management strategies on business performance

Supply chain is a network that consists of manufacturers, suppliers, customers, logistics and distribution systems, and the relationships between them. It includes processes from the manufacturer to the end-user. Supply chain management helps make decisions on which product will be produced, when the proper timing for the manufacturing is, when it will be sold, and which material will be stocked in what quantity. This study mainly focuses on the supply chain management strategies and their possible effects on the company performance for an industrial cluster region in located Izmir/Turkey. At the beginning of the research a comprehensive literature review is presented. Afterwards, importance of the supply chain network is given. Then, main supply chain management strategies of customer integration, supplier integration, internal integration and information-communication technologies are discussed in detail. In this thesis, a comprehensive supply chain questionnaire is conducted with 223 companies to investigate the effects of supply chain management strategies on firm performance. Firm performance contains operational and financial performance. Cronbach's alpha method within the SPSS software is used for reliability analysis. Structural equation modelling (SEM) method is applied via IBM Amos software to the collected data set. Then, results are evaluated in terms of data validity, normality and significance. The findings indicate significant relationship between the firm performance and exogenous latent variables of supplier integration, internal integration, information-communication technologies as the significance factor is comparatively lower than 0.05. Information and communication technologies has the most dominant impact on the firm performance with β1 = 0.852.