استراتژی های زنجیره تامین تولید کنندگان در اتیوپی Supply chain strategies of manufacturers in Ethiopia

Introduction In today’s competitive age, many companies have not succeeded in maximizing their supply chain’s potential because they have often failed to develop the performance measures and metrics needed to fully integrate their supply chain (Gunasekaran et al., 2004). The main problems in supply chain (SC) performance measurements are: i) having a large number of metrics which makes it difficult to identify the critical few among trivial many; ii) failing to connect the strategy and the measurement; iii) having a biased focus on financial metrics and being too much inward looking (Gunasekaran et al., 2004; Gunasekaran and Kobu, 2007) and iv) ignoring social and environmental aspects while dealing with economic aspects in greater depth (Cuthbertson and Piotrowicz, 2011). Clearly, the right choice of performance measure is critical to the success and competitiveness of the firm in the era of globalization (Caplice and Sheffi, 1994; Bhagwat and Sharma, 2007). This is particularly difficult as companies nowadays face a series of challenges like shrinking product life cycles, the proliferation of product variants, and increasing uncertainty on both the demand and the supply side. Dealing efficiently with uncertainty is one of the most crucial points in SC design (Davis, 1993). These uncertainties are demand and supply uncertainties. To reduce uncertainties, proper SC design is needed (Davis, 1993; Lee, 2002). Reducing these uncertainties improves SC performance (Davis, 1993; Mason-Jones and Towill, 1998; Geary et al., 2002; Yang et al., 2004; Prater, 2005). Due to these uncertainties, different SC strategies emerged. Because of these different types of strategies, it is practically impossible to develop a single performance measurement model that applies to all strategies. There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach for successful management of the SC, but different performance measures are appropriate for different strategies. Hence, setting the right SC strategy is mandatory for companies competing in the market (Fisher, 1997; Lee, 2002; Thun, 2005; Chopra and Meindl, 2007; Narasimhan et al., 2008; Jacoby, 2010).