3 Critical Factors Affecting Supply Chain Management: a Case Study in the Us Pallet Industry

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3 Critical Factors Affecting Supply Chain Management: A Case Study in the US Pallet Industry Henry Quesada1, Rado Gazo2 and Scarlett Sanchez1 1Virginia 2Purdue Tech, University USA 1. Introduction Supply chain management is applied by companies across the globe due to its demonstrated results such as delivery time reduction, improved financial performance, greater customer satisfaction, building trust among suppliers, and others. According to D’Amours, Ronnqvist, and Weintraub (2008), companies resort to supply chain practices to improve their performance. Thus, it is important to first understand how their supply chains work. Figure 1 shows a generalized supply chain in the forest products industry. Fig. 1. Forest and wood products supply chain (Campbell and Kazan, 2008) Figure 2 illustrates another example of the steps in a supply chain for wood pallet manufacturing industries. This process begins with logging operations, logs are then sent to the sawmill where cants and/or pallet parts are sent to the wood pallet manufacturer (pallet operations). Lastly, once wood pallets are manufactured, they are sent to a distributor or directly to the final customer. www.intechopen.com 34 Pathways to Supply Chain Excellence Final Customer Cants Logging Operations Sawmill Pallet Operations Pallet Parts Distributor Lumber Fig. 2. Hypothesized wood pallet manufacturing process 2. Identification of Supply Chain Management factors In order to understand how a supply chain works, it is important to identify the factors affecting supply chain management. The identification of these factors has been based on previous work by Li (2002), and Quesada and Meneses (2010). The following sections show generic supply chain management factors and sub-factors that might affect supply chain management activities. 2.1 Environmental uncertainty

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