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Introduction
In today’s competitive business world, enterprises have to continuously improve and maintain their global competitive position to sustain long-term growth and profitability. Therefore, questions about the identification of the competitive advantages of the product have become increasingly important. In the search for potential improvement of the competitive advantages, enterprises need to focus on the basis of product innovation, quality improvement and availability of products always at the lowest attainable costs (Henriques and Peças, 2013). Firms that have effectively managed supply chains (SCs) can achieve these competitive dimensions and will continue to be winners in contemporary business. However, enterprises began to realize that they cannot improve competitive advantages by themselves; the entire SC can improve the competitiveness through cooperation of all stakeholders in the chain to increase quality and reduce cost of products (Wognum et al., 2011). Therefore, supply chain management (SCM) has become an essential prerequisite for increasing competitiveness of products and for also enhancing enterprises’ profitably.
The SC is a combined system which consists of the integration of activities through upstream and downstream linkages, indifferent processes that produce value in the form of products and services in the hands of the ultimate consumers (Christopher, 1992). Thus, SCM is considered as an integrated approach towards increasing the effectiveness of the SC through improved coordinated efforts between upstream and downstream organizations in the system (Frohlich and Westbrook, 2001). It is often used as a popular strategy in different studies for increasing organizational competitiveness and product competitiveness in the global race. Although, there have been various studies that focus separately on different aspects of SCM to increase the competitive advantages. For example, Ellram and Cooper (1990), Spekman et al. (2002) and Chan and Esra Aslanertik (2005) focused on correlations and effective cooperation among stakeholders in the SC to reduce substantial costs and cycle times. Rahman (2002) studied the cause and effect on the dynamic nature of SCs to the formulation of SC growth strategies. Cooper et al. (1997), Lusch and Brown (1996), Salcedo and Grackin (2000) and Nishat Faisal et al. (2006) presented the role of sharing information among SC members for planning, monitoring processes and also helping to mitigate risk in an SC. In addition, Drozdowski (1986) and Treleven (1987) focused on new...