한국기업의 공급사슬관리 전략의 적합성에 관한 실증연구

Today's business environment has become rapidly changed. The development of internet and information technology makes customer needs more segmented and increases customer's demand for product variety and then customers require higher level of customization than ever. Moreover globalization in procurement, manufacturing and distribution makes lead time increasing and product life cycles have become shorter, while customers want products to be quickly supplied at lower price. Under these business environments, managing supply chain effectively is very important for firms to differentiate products and services and to achieve their competitive advantages. The importance of supply chain management(SCM) has been emphasized and there have been many researches on SCM or SCM-related topics. Each product has different product life cycle, demand uncertainty and product variety from others. So many researchers pointed out that since the characteristics of products and customer needs are different according to the product, supply chain performance is improved only when supply chain is designed appropriately to the characteristics of products and customer needs. Since successful SCM depends on how well supply chain strategies are aligned with the characteristics of products and customer needs, strategic fit of SCM has emerged as an important issue in managing supply chains. However there has been no research on empirical analysis for the relationship between supply chain performance and strategic fit of SCM. This paper empirically analyzed whether there exists a difference in supply chain performances according to the extent of strategic fit between implied demand uncertainty and SCM strategies. As in previous researches we translate characteristics of products and customer needs into the metric of implied demand uncertainty and represent SCM strategies as tradeoff between responsiveness and efficiency. We developed two main hypotheses; one is that there exists a difference in supply chain performance according to the extent of strategic fit between implied demand uncertainty and SCM strategy and the other is that for each subgroup with different level of implied demand uncertainty there exist differences in supply chain performance according to the extent of strategic fit. To test the proposed hypotheses, survey data were collected from 122 Korean manufacturing firms and analyzed with factor analysis and clustering analysis. The factors are examined on the basis of preceding researches, and extensible factors are clearly extracted from the literature review. Furthermore, the determinants of a SCM strategy are drawn through a detailed cluster analysis framework. The results of analysis showed that there existed a significant difference in supply chain performances between two groups; group achieving high level of strategic fit and group achieving low level of strategic fit. Interestingly, the difference in supply chain performances was also found within the group achieving high level of strategic fit; that is, the subgroup having high responsive supply chain with high implied demand uncertainty showed higher performance than the subgroup having low responsive supply chain with low implied demand uncertainty. These results imply that i) to achieve the strategic fit, firms should change their supply chain strategies if the characteristics of products and/or customers are changed, and ii) even though the strategic fits are achieved, supply chain of the innovative product has higher performance than the functional product. As a result, this research strongly suggests that companies should employ a right supply chain strategy according to their product attributes and supply chain environments.