| dc.description.abstract | Companies have understood that for effective competition in a continuously changing environment, it is necessary to monitor and understand firm performance. Measurement has been recognized as a crucial element to improve business performance. In order to evolve an effective and efficient supply chain, supply chain management needs to be assessed for its performance in order to know the competitive position of a company in the market place. Attaining a world –class competitive status requires managers to realize that making process decisions to create or purchase products and services customers want and then to distribute them in ways that will satisfy the customers may initially cost more for the firm. Thus it is achieving cost performance together with acceptable levels of quality and customer service performance and then continually improving on these measures that firms must aim toward. This study sought to establish the measures of supply chain performance among manufacturing pharmaceutical firms in Kenya and to determine the relationship between supply chain performance and the performance of manufacturing pharmaceutical firms in Kenya. The study employed a descriptive research design. Data was collected using a self administered questionnaire from 25 respondents which constitute a response rate of 78%. This was sufficiently representative of the target population. Data analysis was done using SPSS with the main analysis tools being frequencies, means, standard deviation, factor analysis and multivariate linear regression. The study found out that there are six specific measures of supply chain performance namely: cash to cash cycle time, production flexibility, delivery performance, perfect order fulfillment performance, total supply chain management costs and e-business performance. It was noted that the implementation of these supply chain performance measures led to improved performance of the firm. It was recommended that all manufacturing pharmaceutical firms should seek to implement these six supply chain performance determinants for overall performance of their firms. It was suggested that future studies could focus on agent and distributing pharmaceutical firms in Kenya since this study concentrated only on manufacturing pharmaceutical firms. One limitation of the study was that it did not fully focus on firm performance since it just gave a highlight. It was therefore suggested that an in –depth analysis of manufacturing firms‟ performance using a balance score card can be considered as an area for further study. | en_US |
