Oleh: Ferry Jie, Ph.D. | School of Business and Law Edith Cowan Joondalup University, Western Australia. Australia.
Research in logistics and supply chain management is growing significantly in the last 5-10 years.
In the context of research in Australia, I did research Agribusiness supply chain management, for example red meat supply chain practices, red meat supply chain performance indicators. In addition, I did recently research in halal food/meat supply chain, then research in dairy supply chain for Australia and Indonesia contexts, also wine and grapes supply chain modelling.
Given Australia has the strongest industry in beef, wine, and dairy as those contribute to Australia GDP.
Below is Australian Beef Supply Chain Empirical Evidence:
Empirical models were developed to analyse supply chain practice, antecedent cooperative behaviour, and supply chain performance indicators for Australian cattle producers, processors and retailers/wholesalers. Based on the results of these analyses, the last objective was to suggest alternative configurations for these supply chains that enhance performance of the businesses concerned.
For Australian beef producers, competitive advantage was significantly influenced by the supply chain performance components food quality, flexibility and responsiveness. These in turn are related to customer relationships and information quality. Given these findings, cattle producers should focus on customer relationships and information quality in order to achieve better flexibility and food quality in their supply chain performance.
For Australian beef processors, two performance indicators (food quality and responsiveness) significantly influence their competitive advantage. Interestingly, three elements of supply chain practice (customer relationships, information quality and trust) are significantly related to both food quality and responsiveness. In addition, customer relationships and information quality have a strongly positive impact on the responsiveness supply chain performance indicator.
For Australian beef retailers/wholesalers three performance indicators (food quality, efficiency and responsiveness) are significantly influencing their competitive advantage. Considering first food quality, four elements of supply chain practice (information sharing, information quality, strategic supplier partnerships and commitment) have a significant positive correlation with food quality. Only strategic supplier partnerships have a strong positive correlation with food quality, therefore this study focused on this issue. Second, four elements of supply chain practice (lean thinking, information quality, trust and commitment) have a significant positive correlation with efficiency. Only lean thinking and information quality have a strong positive impact on the efficiency key performance indicator, therefore this research discussed lean thinking and information quality, respectively. Third, four elements of supply chain practice (customer relationship management, information sharing, trust and commitment) have a significant positive correlation with responsiveness. The research focused on trust and commitment only, as they have a strong positive correlation with responsiveness.
The significant overall problem for performance of the Australian beef supply chain was unskilled and inexperienced staff or personnel. Based on the results of the research, the suggested solutions are to provide training, knowledge and skills development, to integrate training methods with innovation and technology diffusion, to select and hire higher skilled migrants (outsourcing), to expand the group training provisions across Australia, to have deeper and richer relationships between industry, vocational education and training and higher education sectors, and to have better targeted recruitment.
It was observed that the Australian beef industry currently uses three supply chain performance measures: the Supply Chain Operations Reference Model, the Balanced Scorecard (BSC), and Activity Based Costing (ABC). An application of the Balanced Scorecard to the supply chain was proposed for Australian cattle livestock/producers.
Future Research in Logistics and Supply Chain Management:
In this short article, I may suggest that there are potential future research in logistics and supply chain management, there are:
- Supply chain analytics, “Big Data” in logistics and supply chain management;
- Supply chain sustainability or reverse logistics;
- Supply chain technologists;
- Halal food supply chain modelling;
- Supply chain quality management involved lean six sigma and agility context;
- LEAGILE (lean and agility supply chain management);
- Supply chain policy and regulation;
- Supply chain humanitarian;
- Supply chain risk and uncertainty context,
- Transportation “One Belt One Road Obor” context-China Transportation Framework.
With all of these above, let’s work together for research collaboration between academia, industry practitioners and governments.
6 Desember 2016.
*Isi artikel merupakan pemikiran penulis dan/atau sepenuhnya menjadi tanggung jawab penulis, serta tidak selalu mencerminkan pemikiran atau pandangan resmi Supply Chain Indonesia.
Download artikel ini:
SCI- Australian Beef Supply Chain Empirical Evidence and Future Research in Supply Chain Management (586.2 KiB, 331 hits)
