Benefits, Barriers, Bridges to the Implementation of an Efficient Supply Chain Management System in Retail

Running head: SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
Benefits, Barriers, Bridges to the Implementation of an Efficient Supply Chain Management
System in Retail
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

1SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
Chapter 1: Introduction
Research Background
Supply chain management is the backbone of any business irrespective of the
operating market and industry. Therefore, strategic supply chain management can boost the
productivity of any business while keeping the total investment under control. In retail sector
the supply chain is the biggest part of the business, because of 2 phases product line structure
namely inbound and outbound logistics (Bryman and Bell 2015). At the same time, as an
advanced way of Strategic Supply Chain Management (SSCM), Integrated Supply Chain
Management (ISCM) also includes the selection of partnership, product segmentation, testing
parameters, inventory management and other initial phase of development cycle. Because of
direct dependence on inbound product units, the market demand also highly influences the
implementation of integrated operation within existing supply chain management. At the
same time, a retail company has to take care of their inventory management and information
handling measures that can create challenges in the intermediate phase of product cycle
(Chatterjee 2016). Apart from that, external factors like geographical position, scope of
transportation, technological advancement, socio-cultural influence in market, political and
legal interaction can create significant barrier in the supply chain management of any
company, especially in retail sector (Sampath 2015).
Background of the companies
Comparative analysis can help to explore the different sections of the supply chain
management and their potential improvement plan. For the comparative analysis of the
supply chain management system in UAE for retails sector three retail companies have been
chosen namely Al Hokair Fashion Retail, Bin Hendi Enterprises LLC, Landmark Group.

2SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
Al Hokair Fashion Retail is a largest franchise retailer in the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia, MENA, UAE and other central Asian countries. The company was established in
1990 and is currently retailing various fashion products of different fashion brands. The
company has worldwide base of suppliers who provides wide variety of cosmetics, footwear,
bags and garments (Touzani, Hirschman and Salah 2016).
Bin Hendi Enterprises LLC was established in 1974 and has brought many premium
level brands to the market of Middle East. However, the current operational market of this
company is UAE. They have different brands for different product markets including
beverage, cosmetics, fast food, garments and others. Because of the diversity of the product
line the company prefers to use customer directly as part of supply chain management (Simon
et al. 2015).
Landmark Group is a multinational conglomerate business based on Dubai and was
founded in 1973. Currently the Landmark Group has huge market base in retail industry of
middle east and southern Asia (Thomas and E. Carraher 2014). The major retail products of
Landmark retail group is Apparel, Footwear, Consumer electronics, Home improvement
materials and Furniture. Recently they have started a new products retailing that consists of
different baby products.
Rationale
From the beginning of the 21 century the economy of UAE is developing drastically
in terms of globalisation, GDP, per capita income, employment rate and per capita
investment. Touzani, Hirschman and Salah (2016), and many other research scholars and
market analysts argue that too much focus on the development of oil and gas industry is
minimising the scope of flourishing the retail industry. Being an arid region the Middle
Eastern countries have to depend on the imported goods for their retail market. Therefore,