Cost management practices for supply chain management: an exploratory analysis

Cost management within a supply chain management domain has lately received a great deal of interest from academics and practitioners; however, the literature is still dominated by conceptual and anecdotal work. The major issue is that it is difficult at best to draw conclusion with any level of confidence concerning the actual degree of usage of various cost management practices. The study reported in this article uses split sample analysis to determine the extent to which firms actually use 18 SCM-related cost management practices. The sample that was developed included 126 medium- and large-sized Swiss firms. The results show that only supplier evaluation and purchasing performance benchmarking are regularly employed by companies and that cost management practices linked to integrated logistics are applied only rarely in corporate practice. In this study, seven of the cost management practices were associated with higher supply chain performance, which suggests that firms should carefully consider their implementation.