Akihiro Hamasaki

Between “PLANET” in toiletry industry and “FINET” in food industry to be the typical cases of physical distribution alliance among the competing companies, we can find the difference of alliance form. In this paper, we do case study and try to consider the influence factor under the idea whether the history of manufacturers and wholesalers specifically has an influence to this difference.

Recently, interest in logistics and supply chain management has grown explosively through exposure to fierce competition and changing circumstances. This interest has led many companies to build their supply chain. In most cases, however, organizational constraints impede their formation of supply chain management (SCM). To breakthrough these constraints, various kinds of scorecards have been developed. A scorecard is a simplified benchmark methodology to diagnose and evaluate various advantages and disadvantages of business operations, such as IT utilization, etc. from the point of total optimization of SCM. In this study, we propose and develop the general-purpose scorecard named the SCM logistics scorecard (LSC) after conducting survey research on various scorecards, and verify its validity and effectiveness. To do this, we gather actual data based on LSC from many manufacturing companies and extract five factors, which represent the drivers of managerial performance through these data. Using the corresponding companies' financial bottom line indexes, we analyze the correlation between these indexes and our factors. The result shows that higher scores of LSC, which leads to higher scores in the five factors, bring significantly positive financial outcomes. At the same time, we also verify statistically that IT itself is just an enabler or means in building SCM by introducing a causal-effect model among these factors leading to managerial performances.

This paper considers how company logistics competence influences its financial bottom line. SCM Logistics Score Card (LSC) was developed to self-evaluate the working methods and performance from the viewpoint of Supply Chain Management. Analyzing the LSC data and the corresponding financial measures, this paper clarifies the existence of their positive correlations statistically, and then reconsiders the role of logistics department referring to the results of hearing survey.