Supply chain management and logistics complexity: a contingency approach

By empirically exploring the correlation between logistics complexity-related contextual conditions and supply chain management (SCM) objectives and decision areas/practices, this study aims to investigate whether, and the means by which, supply chain managers of large manufacturing companies adopt a contingency approach in their supply chain decisions. This study involves a comprehensive literature review followed by an analysis of survey data using cluster analysis, factor analysis and binary logistic regression. Statistically significant relationships were found between logistics complexity-related contextual conditions and supply chain objectives and decision areas. Although some prescriptive context-dependent models for supply chain management can be found in the literature, this research tries to fill a gap by empirically demonstrating that large manufacturing companies actually tend to make their supply chain choices contingent upon their logistics complexity-related context.