Bhimaraya A. Metri

Impact of agile supply chains' delivery practices on firms' performance: cluster analysis and validation

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the critical distribution practices of agile supply chains and provide a comprehensive framework that can be used to improve the responsiveness of supply chains. The research is carried out in the context of different manufacturing industries and provides empirical evidence that agile supply chain distribution enhances organisational performance.Design/methodology/approach – The paper employed survey research, using a sample of 128 manufacturing companies.Findings – The paper explores the critical distribution practices of supply chains that make supply chains agile. Collaborative distribution, order commitment, distribution flexibility and inventory management are the key SCM distribution practices associated with agile supply chains, and have significant impact on organisational performance.Research limitations/implications – Data were collected from a single node/respondent of a supply chain. Further research could be carried out using mutiple node dat...

Quality management in a healthcare organisation: a case of South Indian hospital

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to provide an analysis of quality management using the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Criteria (MBNQA) criteria in a 300‐bed hospital in South India.Design/methodology/approach – Based on Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) criteria in‐depth interviews are conducted with the heads of the departments in the case hospital. Data is analysed and compared with the MBNQA points to evaluate the performance of the hospital in all the seven criterias of MBNQA.Findings – The paper presents the strengths and opportunities for improvement through MBNQA criteria. The total points scored are 753 out of 1,000 points. This reveals that quality performance of case hospital is of higher level. However among all the seven criteria, the hospital has still more opportunity to improve the quality in MBNQA criteria no. 4, i.e. measure, analysis and knowledge management.Research limitations/implications – This study brings out a potential area of research about how t...

Disaster mitigation framework for India using quality circle approach

Purpose – Given the widespread lack of proper mechanism for disaster management, this paper aims to develop a disaster mitigation framework using quality circle (QC) – a bottom‐up approach.Design/methodology/approach – The paper considers QC and discussing the utility of the concept with respect to disaster management. Discusses the process of systematically building a disaster mitigation framework.Findings – By having the proposed framework, the disasters that occur can be tackled speedily. Owing to the direct involvement of public (key stakeholders), the proposed framework strengthens the knowledge and awareness on disaster management, which in turn helps towards disaster preparedness and disaster mitigation effectively.Practical implications – The current efforts at disaster mitigation are not successful. The proposed framework provides proactive collaboration among all players including central, state governments and local people to examine risks and vulnerability to all hazards and to implement measu...

Relating Organised Retail Supply Chain Management Practices, Competitive Advantage and Organisational Performance

Effective supply chain management has become a potential way nowadays to improve organisational performance through matching supply chain practices and competitive advantages in the competitive world. Organisations focus on better supply chain management practices to gain competitive advantage for better organisational performance. This research conceptualises and develops five secondary constructs for supply chain practices (use of technology, SC speed, Customer satisfaction, SC integration, and Inventory management). The research also identifies four primary competitive advantage constructs (Inventory Management, Customer Satisfaction, Profitability, and Customer Base Identification) and six primary organisational performance constructs (Market Performance, SC Competencies, Stakeholder Satisfaction, and Innovation and Learning). The data for analysis was collected from top 10 non-livestock organised retail players operating in Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, New Delhi and, Gurgaon in India. The relationships among supply chain practices, competitive advantage, and organisational performance, are tested in the proposed framework using structural equation modelling. The results indicate that Indian retailers know that competitive advantage has high impact on SCP but they fail in matching supply chain practices, competitive advantage and, organisational performance.

Total Quality Transportation Through Deming’s 14 Points

Transportation organizations, especially public transit corporations, have not followed the lead of manufacturing or other service industries in adopting Total Quality Management (TQM). In recent years, quality has become an important competitive strategy in the global market. In the near future, due to World Trade Organization agreements, globalization, and competitiveness, transit organizations will have to adopt TQM for their operations to continue. This paper presents a background on TQM and addresses the imperatives of using this strategy in transit organizations. The paper examines total quality transportation and its organizational structure and implementation model in relation to Deming’s 14 points. The model presented in this research provides enhanced tactics for transportation quality and customer satisfaction.

Supply Chain Management Practices, Competitive Advantage and Organizational Performance: A Confirmatory Factor Model

Supply chain is the process of continuous flow of products or services from source to the destination. Supply chain management has become an effective tool now a day to survive in this competitive world. Organizations do their best to harvest profits by adopting better supply chain management practices for competitive advantage and organizational performance. In this paper an attempt has been made to understand the relationship among supply chain practices, competitive advantage, and organizational performance using structural equation modelling. This research conceptualizes and develops five secondary dimensions of supply chain practices (Use of technology, SC speed, Customer satisfaction, SC integration, and Inventory management). The research also identifies four primary competitive advantage components (Inventory management, Customer satisfaction, Profitability, and Customer base identification) and six primary organizational performance components (Financial Performance, Market performance, SC competencies, Customer satisfaction, Stakeholder satisfaction, and Innovation and learning). The data for analysis was collected from top 10 non-livestock organized retail players operating in Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, New Delhi and, Gurgaon in India. The relationships in the proposed framework were tested using structural equation modelling. The results indicate that Indian retailers know that competitive advantage has high impact on SCP but they have less understanding in matching SCP and competitive advantage with organizational performance.

SWOT-AHP Approach for Sustainable Manufacturing Strategy Selection: A Case of Indian SME

Manufacturing firms are facing growing internal and external pressures to adopt manufacturing and supply chain strategies that fulfil the expectations of various stakeholders in value chain. Literature highlights that despite positive relationship between firm performance and sustainable development strategies, manufacturing industry, particularly small and medium enterprises (SMEs), are slow to adopt sustainable practices. Researchers highlight that the inability to identify and prioritize critical factors for strategy formulation and implementation is the main reason that inhibits SMEs to accrue the sustainability-related benefits. This article presents a combination of strength, weakness, opportunities and threats analysis and analytic hierarchy process for identifying and prioritizing critical sustainable manufacturing and supply chain factors by an Indian metal recycling medium-size firm. After assigning priority rankings to the shortlisted strategies, company was able to select and deploy highly successful strategy for improving sustainable business performance.

The behavioural causes of the bullwhip effect: breaking the mould

The Bullwhip Effect (BWE) has been a major challenge facing supply chains for several decades. An important stream of literature has developed around Supply Line Underweighting (SLU) and hoarding behaviour as the behavioural causes of BWE. The present study builds on these studies and devises novel experiments to replicate and verify them. The findings suggest that the aforementioned behavioural causes do not hold and point to a need to break new ground on this well-researched topic. The paper concludes with the managerial and research implications.

Modeling Supply Chain Performance: A Structural Equation Approach

Supply chain management (SCM) has become an effective tool now a day to survive in this competitive world. Organizations do their best to improve performance by adopting better supply chain (SC) performance indicators. In this paper 19 key performance indicators (KPI) were identified based on strong literature support in consultation of practitioners and consultants in the field of non-livestock retailing (NLR). NLR is the retailing of agriculture and horticulture products. The technique of factor analysis using principal component analysis with Varimax rotation has classified KPI into four factors as; inventory metrics, customer metrics, flexibility metrics and growth and learning metrics. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) approach was used to develop and validate a model for measuring SC performance of organized NLR industry based on KPI. The data for analysis was collected from top 10 organized NLR players operating in Punjab, Chandigarh, New Delhi and Gurgaon in India. The results were subjected to rigorous statistical tests for reliability and validity. Finally, these classified KPI were presented in the form of a model to measure SC performance of organized NLR industry using SEM.

Analytical modelling of multi stage convergent supply chain system under just-in-time

The main objective of this paper is to develop an analytical model for operational level decisions for convergent supply chain system controlled by kanban under JIT where a product is assembled from a number of components supplied by many multistage supply chains. It integrates production and shipment lot size across the various stages of supply chain so that components travel through the supply chain in a coordinated way without any mismatch and final product reaches the customer in time. A quantitative analytical approach has been followed to develop the non-linear integer program (NLIP) and a generic LINGO program also has been developed for NLIP using branch and bound method for optimisation. This model facilitates integrated supply chain optimisation for system wide inventory, logistic and production setup costs optimisation. The model has been validated using automotive supply chain data. However, it can be applied to any industry.