The Determinants of Supply Chain

Liu 1 Chao Liu Dr. Larry Weinstein MBA 7800 10 Sep. 2012 Summary of the determinants of supply chain alliance performance: an empirical study As the market is becoming more and more competitive, cooperative alliance between companies is becoming common. There are two explanations of cooperative alliance between suppliers and buyers, as the article goes, one is the partner firms aiming at acquiring resources including materials, skills and information; the other explanation is defined from the goal perspective. With the increasing importance of supply chain management, supplier-buyer relationship is also being attached significance and alliance promotes the success of win-win result within the relationship. Based on the background, this article explores the supply chain alliance and the performance of associated alliance. The author uses many quantitative methods to collect and analyze data obtained from seven variables. From the scatterplots of dependent variables against independent variables, we can see that plots centers on the upper right side of that coordinate, we can therefore conclude that the factor of stability has a significant impact on the performance of supply chain alliance, however, based on the smoothing curve below, when stability increase to a certain point, performance of alliance starts to decrease with a little scope. According to the same principle, the variable of trust also has a significant impact on the performance of the alliance. In the smoothing curve, the performance increases slowly when trust stays at a low level and it increases sharply when trust goes high. With the help of the scatterplots figure and the smoothing curve, we can easily identify the relationship between different factors affecting performance and alliance performance. At last, as the author suggests, success of supply chain requires wide focus, more comprehensive data to generate more accurate interpretation.