ASSESMENT OF THE PRACTICE & CHALLENGES OF SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT : THE CASE OF KOMBOLCHA TEXTILE S.C

Abstract

Supply chain management is one of the major factor that enable manufacturing industries to their business performance. Successful manufacturing industries have best practice supply chain management. Kombolcha Textile S.c has low business performance. One of the main reason is poor supply chain management practices. The main objective of this thesis is to study existing practices and challenges of supply chain management of the company, and recommend improvement direction. To achieve this objective, a literature survey has been conducted through descriptive research approach to get empirical knowledge. The selections of the respondents were carried out by using non probability sampling technique. 125 respondents from the company employees and managers were considered as a sample unit using judgmental sampling methods. Furthermore, 11 customers and 6 suppliers were interviewed based on convenience methods . Purposive sampling methods were also used to interview workers who are directly related with the subject. The existing supply chain management practices of the company have been assessed using questionnaire, interview and secondary data. The data was analyzed by using descriptive statistics and presented in tables. The major findings indicates that, most of the SCM practices (supplier customer relationship, training , IT and company integration with supplier) are poorly applied which represented with group mean value of 1.95,1.84,1.81,and 1.99respectively.Whereas internal operation and cross functional integration with in the company shows good performance and the rest variables indicates satisfactory performance. Based on both questioner and interview analysis the case company has poor relationship with customers and suppliers and poor customers’ services. Manufacturing uncertainty, demand and supply uncertainty are the major headaches or challenges of the case company’s SC which prohibits effective implementation of SCM. To improve the existing supply chain management practices of the company ,improvement directions are forwarded based on the analysis results.