Food Suplly Chain Mangement Practice and Factors Affecting Its Performance: The Case of Wholesalers and Retailers Addis Ababa
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Date
2022-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Food supply chain; which has an economic and political significance for all countries is become increasingly complex and geographically decoupled in production and consumption activities. With high urbanization and poor productivity ensuring food security especially in the city is a real challenge for developing countries. 21.7 % of the population in Ethiopia is living in cities and Addis Ababa city dweller is estimated 5.2 million with 4.44% growth rate according to the World Bank 2022 reports. It is very challenging to feed most populous city of the country with fragmented, traditional and manipulated supply network. Access to food through wholesale and retail supply chain distribution is very significant for the urban population. A major challenge in supply chain management is the coordination of the different activities taking place between all the involved participants. Understanding the interdependencies and the complexity of these activities in a supply chain is elementary to actually managing it (Holmberg, 2000). Considering the philosophy “What you cannot measure, you cannot manage”, measuring the supply chain performance becomes tremendously important for companies and their supply chains in order stay competitive. So far only a small number of performance measurement systems exist that can help to understand and improve a supply chain’s overall performance. Purpose: The purpose of this master thesis is therefore to analyze supply chain performance measurement systems and identify problems and challenges when measuring the performance of a supply chain. Research Method: Since this thesis aims at finding problems and challenges which highly differ and depend on individual companies, a qualitative approach has been chosen because of the variety of expected results. In most cases, qualitative research is based on different kinds of data collection methods (Patton, 2002), questionnaires have been used in this thesis. Conclusion: The found theoretical and practical problems and challenges were combined and a final list of challenges for supply chain performance measurement was developed. The developed list included the following six challenges: Unfavorable Supply Chain Operating Rule, lack of Supply Chain Assets, poor Supply Chain Resources, and unclear Supply chain Network, monotonous Regulation and lack of Information Technology support. This thesis therefore offers the basis of further research by providing a list of challenges which need to be considered to successfully measure supply chain performance. Key words: Food Supply Chain, enablers, challenges, performance.