A Qualitative Research on Strategic Performance of Supply Chain in the Automotive Industry

Nowadays, automakers have faced complexity of supply chain that led them to improve procedures and processes in order to ensure high performance at both strategic and operational levels. The main purpose of this research is to develop strategic performance of supply chain (SPSC) including information technology (IT), organizational learning (OL), and Product innovation (PRI) via qualitative research. In fact, this research explains how these factors affect SPSC. Irankhodro Company (IKCO) as the biggest automaker in Middle East is our case study in order to conduct research and develop a model to explore the phenomena and events associated with the strategic performance of this SC. A total number of 12 interviews were done based on a list of semistructured open-ended questions in order to evaluate constructs and models. The development of constructs in IKCO according to respondents’ opinions was classified into three categories including high, medium, and low developed levels. In the high-developed level, IT has been developed in IKCO more than another constructs consisting of development of ORACLE system, SAP, and KANBAN in order to cover information, procedures, and processes across supply chain. While SPSC construct as a dependent variable has been developed less than others. The main research contribution is to develop SPSC model at first in the automotive industry. The another contribution is a common strategy matrix to illustrate common strategies between IKCO and key suppliers as shown in Table 5 to acquire high performance at the strategic level.