Research On Chain-retailer-leading Supply Chain Competitiveness

With the development of chain operation, retail's contribitions are growing in expanding domestic demand, incresing employment, enhancing the operating efficiency of national economy, and ultimately increasing the social welfare. Chain retailer began to occupy the central position of supply chain and quickly cause for more concern.About how to get competitive advantage of Chain-retailer-leading (CRL) supply chain, the dissertation starts from the concept, forming mechanism and model of supply chain competitiveness, focuses on the management characteristics and competitiveness research framework of CRL supply chain, analyses three core competences of CRL supply chain competitivesness and their formations. The dissertation, furthermore, empirically analyzes China's CRL supply chain competitiveness. The primary coverages of the dissertation are as follows:i) The formation of supply chain competitiveness should be recognised from systematic perspective. Core competence, operation mechanism and measurement are three forces to affect the formation of supply chain competitiveness. As it was known from the viewpoint of supply chain core competence basing on process, the competitiveness of supply chain is decided by competences of organization, operations and integration, which, furthermore, are decided by the management of their relevent key business process. Different retail formats with their specific contents and business models complicate the study of CRL supply chain competitiveness. The fomation of three competences, therefore, should be analysed basing on different retail formats.ii) Whether the supply chain be able to obtain organization competence depends on the element constitute being able to make supply chain have the strong characteristic of adaptability or not. The competition strategic choice of CRL supply chain, basing on the tradeoff between service and economy, should stategically match with the utility constitution of core enterprise's retail fomat. The location of chain store is of siginificant strategic meanings to CRL supply chain.iii) The operations competence of supply chain should keep sufficient agility. The dissertation, employing echelon inventory system, brings forward three-echelon inventory system and its optimization model under inventory control policy of chain supermarkert and chain convenient store leading supply chain, and two-echelon inventory system and its optimazation model under inventory control policy of department store leading supply chain. The decision-making of transport and distribution should follow two matching principles, which are matching the loacation of distribution center with the store network, matching the distribution polices with the product characteristics.iv) The essence of supply chain integration is the process of coordination and cooperation of supply chain. The importances of CRL supply chain's coordination and cooperation are the cultivation of customer loyalty, the estalishment of cooperative relationship between vendors and retailers, and their information sharing.v) The dissertation employs AHP to evaluate China's CRL supply chain competitiveness. The results indicate that the overall competitiveness of China's CRL supply chain, especially its integration competence is limited. The empirically analysis to five important retail formats show that: Chain-household-appliances-store-leading supply chain has the highest level of competitiveness, which is relating to oligopoly structure of China's household appliance retail market; Chain-supermaket-leading supply chain has the lowest level of competitiveness due to the fierce market competition and low organization competence resulting from retailer's unclear positioning; Chain-general merchandise-store-leading supply chain has the lowest level of integration competence as a result from more customer complaints about service attitude and higher sloting allowance; Department-store-leading supply chain has the lowest level of operations competence because of its joint operation model, which lead to low logistic effeiciency.