Title: Prospecting rural supply chain management using a structured approach

Authors: K. Sunil Kumar; A. Subash Babu

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering, Trivandrum, Kerala – 695016, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai, Maharashtra – 400076, India

Abstract: The Indian retail, manufacturing and infrastructure sectors are poised for rapid growth and are facing new challenges in logistics and supply chain issues related to rural areas. Various reports suggest that with over 70% of the economy centred around the rural parts of the country, these markets offer tremendous scope and many firms are looking at appropriate strategies to address this issue. However, many practitioners and researchers seem to believe that the issues related to marketing and supply chain are radically different from the traditional approaches hitherto used. It was envisaged to verify how realistic these opinions are. The approach used was to develop structural relationships involving three well known frameworks such as the supply chain operations reference (SCOR) elements, marketing processes (MP) and the marketing mix variables (MMV) in the context of rural supply chain so as to evolve strategies for understanding and managing rural supply chain better. The study revealed that there is significantly varying associations among different groups of marketing processes with the elements of SCOR and this is also true with different groups of marketing variables. The findings of the study are reported in this paper.

Keywords: marketing processes; supply chain operations reference; SCOR; marketing mix variables; MMV; rural supply chains; supply chain management; SCM; India; rural areas.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPM.2013.053649

International Journal of Procurement Management, 2013 Vol.6 No.3, pp.255 - 279

Published online: 30 Jan 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article