Supply Chain Management and Organizational Performance: an Empirical Investigation with Special to E-Commerce Organizations in India

Abstract

Supply chain management (SCM) is a crucial strategic driver for increasing operational performance and maximizing the achievement of organizational objectives, such as improved productivity, improved customer service and enhanced profitability. The age of both market globalization and outsourcing has started, and many companies tend to manage their supply chain and logistics activities. Most of these organizations understand that SCM needs to be tested for its performance in order to create an effective and efficient supply chain. Since e-commerce buys and sells goods over the Internet, in addition to payment between the two parties, it is the transfer of goods that also needs to occur in a correct and timely manner, hence the need for the supply chain. The supply chain is the most critical element for companies to boom in e-commerce, which needs to be quick, uninterrupted and safe. The competition is fierce because not one or two, but hundreds of e-commerce companies are competing for market share, each finding and creating specific strategies for sale and distribution. The present study is an attempt to examine various issues of supply chain management in the E-Commerce context. Although there is a lack of literature in this context, the current study critically reviewed the current literature and built a questionnaire with the inputs from leading e-commerce managers by identifying the main supply chain management issues such as preparation, inbound, outbound, returns, orders and trying to find the effect of these variables on organizational efficiency. A sample size of 100 employees employed in supply chain departments at different levels of five leading e-commerce fashion & lifestyle organizations in India was taken for a questionnaire survey as a sampling unit. The study found fascinating insights of supply chain management in e-commerce, which eventually benefit the marketers to design more effective supply chain management. Further, this study becomes a gap filler for the existing literature deficiency in the Indian context and an e-commerce context.