An empirical investigation of supply chain management excellence framework in Indian manufacturing industry

There are no standard constructs or pillars of SCM excellence in literature, based on review of 57 SCM framework articles identified from 21 peer reviewed journals, which revealed that none of the constructs exhibited frequent repetition. This meant that none of the construct can be considered as a standard pillar of SCM. Thus in order to establish pillars of SCM excellence, an empirical investigation is carried out in the Indian manufacturing industry. A survey questionnaire was used to collect responses from the Indian manufacturing industry. The observed variables were subjected to principal component analysis (PCA) to find out underlying pillars of SCM excellence. The SCM excellence framework was found to be consisting of nine pillars. The framework of SCM excellence was then subjected to evaluation of reliability of pillars, followed by examining their construct, convergent and discriminant validity. The nine pillars of SCM excellence obtained after PCA, exhibited 204 constructs. Later when the reliability of each pillar was maximized, the number of constructs reduced to 133. The final cronbach's alpha values for these nine pillars ranged from 0.71 to 0.94, which is considered to be a good indicator of reliability of the scale. The examination of convergent and discriminant validity established the SCM excellence framework in Indian manufacturing industry. The study presented in the paper is unique, since such an attempt to derive pillars of SCM excellence, and empirical investigation of SCM excellence framework in Indian manufacturing industry has never been attempted in extant literature.