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Keywords
Supply chain management, Systems analysis, Fuzzy logic, Performance measures
Abstract
Supply chain management (SCM) has gained a tremendous amount of attention from both industries and researchers since the last decade. Until now, there are numerous papers, articles, and reports that address SCM, but there is still a lack of integration between the existing performance measurement methods and practical requirements for the SCM. An innovative performance measurement method is proposed to provide necessary assistance for performance improvement in SCM. The proposed method will address this purpose in these four aspects: a simplified supply chain model; tangible and intangible performance measures in multiple dimensions; a cross-organizational performance measurement; and fuzzy set theory and weighted average method.
1. Introduction
In modern business environments, manufacturers face an increasing pressure of customers' requirements in products customisation, quality improvement, and demand responsiveness. In order to sustain the business under these pressures, more and more enterprises are striving to develop long-term strategic partnerships with a few competent suppliers and collaborate with them in product development, inventory control, and non-core process outsourcing. In addition, the increasing competitive imperatives of cost efficiency and customer responsiveness have pushed firms to pursue strategic alliance with suppliers, downstream customers, and a host of logistics service providers to exploit their capabilities and create new value to end consumers. This partnership or alliance is known as supply chain and the planning, organizing, and control of the activities in this supply chain is called supply chain management (SCM).
Although SCM has become common practice across all industries, and a steady stream of articles dealing with theories and practices of SCM have been published, the topic of performance measurement of SCM does not receive adequate attention therein (Beamon, 1999; Gunasekaran et al., 2001). As an indispensable management tool, performance measurement provides the necessary assistance for performance improvement in pursuit of supply chain excellence. However, many critical drawbacks pervert the existing performance measurement systems (PMSs) from making significant contribution to the development and improvement of SCM. With the aim to fill this gap, this paper attempts to propose an innovative performance measurement method for SCM.
Performance measurement is an essential element of effective planning and control, as well as decision making. It can provide necessary feedback information to...