| dc.description.abstract | Today, large companies are mainly focusing on becoming efficient and flexible in their
manufacturing methods in order to handle uncertainty in the business environment. To do
this, they need different strategies to manage the flow of goods from the point of production
to the consumer. However, most firms have not been able to formulate the right strategies
required to achieve this objective in Supply Chain Management (SCM). This calls for a
strategic fit of an organization’s core competencies, strategy and core capability, which is an
emerging paradigm in the study of strategic management and specifically in SCM.
This paper focuses on SCM best practices used by large private manufacturing firms in
Kenya. The preliminary tests employed the use of Kaiser Mayer-Olkin (KMO) and Bartlett’s
Test. In this case, KMO measures the sampling adequacy which should be greater than 0.5
for a satisfactory analysis to proceed. For this paper, the outcome revealed a measure of
0.583, an indication that the Bartlett’s Test of spericity is significant implying that the
correlation matrix is non-singular and therefore, the factor analysis model is satisfactory.
A sample of 52 large private manufacturing companies of the supply chain firms representing
all large private manufacturing companies, which are members of Kenya Association of
Manufacturers (KAM) was used. To establish SCM best practices, 39 variables were used to
measure the level of application among these firms. These variables were analyzed using
factor analysis procedure and in order to achieve a simple and meaningful structure, that is,
have a nonzero loading of the explained variance for each individual factors, varimax rotation
was done. As a result, 11 critical factors were established as the best practices which include:
operating policies, linkages within supply chain firms, improved performance, information
technology systems, strategic alliance, performance measures, goal orientation, customer
relationships, guidelines and procedures, supplier selection and supplier evaluation. When
benchmarked, these practices were found to be universal and compares well with the best
practices globally. The implications of the findings are also discussed | en |
