An empirical analysis of warehouse measurement systems in the context of supply chain implementation

Supply Chain Management (SCM) is one of the most popular management concepts to impact business and the logistics concept in the 1990s. Problems facing the concept of SCM include (1) the lack of research on what it means to practice SCM, (2) how to implement a SCM program, and (3) how to measure the performance of a supply chain. A major contributing factor to these problems is defining which processes are managed in a supply chain and which firms, or intermediaries, are included in a supply chain. This research will focus on the warehousing component of the supply chain process and, in particular, on how firms measure the performance of their warehouse (intermediary) operations. Two types of firms will be used for the analysis: those implementing a supply chain orientation and those that are not. The empirical analysis will offer a comparison between common warehouse performance measurements for SCM-oriented firms and non-SCM-oriented firms and provide insight into the relationship between managers' perceptions of warehouse measurement effectiveness and the degree of SCM sophistication.