ABSTRACT

This research is aimed to examine the issues related to technology enablement,

information sharing, performance measurement system, integration and agility of the supply

chain management. A questionnaire based survey has been conducted to gain insights of various

issues related to AMT- enablement of supply chain in select sectors of Indian manufacturing

Industries. Four sectors of the Indian manufacturing industry namely auto, machinery, machine

tools and electrical / electronics have been covered. A literature review has been conducted to

identify the gaps in SCM research especially in Indian context. This research has attempted to fill

some of the gaps in the contemporary research. Therefore, some hypotheses are framed and a

questionnaire instrument is developed. The Descriptive statistics and hypothesis testing provide

us insights about SCM and AMT practices in the Indian industries. To identify the need and

analyze the benefit of AMT to Indian Industries factor analysis and discriminate analysis has

been done using the data obtained through the questionnaire. Due to need of integration and

agility in Indian Industries an ISM- based framework has been developed for acquiring

integration and agility.

The major contribution of the research is as follows:

• A literature review has been conducted to identify various issues, related to SCM in general,

and use of AMT in supply chains in particular. Therefore, a questionnaire has been

developed to identify the issues related to AMT- enablement of supply chains in Indian

manufacturing Industry.

• Various issues related to the AMT-enablement of supply chains in Indian manufacturing

companies have been identified and discussed on the basis of the empirical study.
• Two sets of hypotheses concerning common supply chain issues and sector-specific practices

have been formulated and tested.

• Different AMT has been categorized, their adoption level, reasons of adoption and benefits

perceived has been analyzed statistically using data obtained from survey. Interesting

observations has been reported about AMT adoption in the way to consolidate supply chain

management.

• The impact of variety of information sharing on the competitive strengths of Indian

Manufacturing Enterprises has been identified using correlation analysis on data received in

the survey.

• The Performance measurement system of Indian manufacturing enterprises has studies for

different performance metrics, identified with balanced score card approach. Each

performance indicator has been surveyed for three perspective namely Frequency of use,

Perceived usage value and Ease of Measurement. Important observations have been reported

for different performance Indicators.

• In order to synthesize the work, an Interpretive Structural Modeling based framework has

been developed for integration and agility of Supply Chain Management. This develop the

relationships among important enablers for integration and agility of supply chain

management.

These relationships are useful to make supply chain integrated and agile.

The present research focuses on various issues related to AMT- enablement of supply chains.

It provides a better understanding of the status and readiness of AMT-enablement of supply

chains in select sectors of Indian Manufacturing Enterprises.

Key Words: Advanced manufacturing technologies, Supply chain management, Information

sharing, Performance measurement system, Integration, Agility, Empirical Study,

Interpretive structural modeling.