Knowledge Asset and Inter-Organizational Relationship in the Performance of Australian Beef Supply Chain

Supply Chain Management has become a strategic issue in firm’s success where Knowledge Asset and inter-organizational system can play a substantial role. Given that Australian beef industry is production pushed and lags behind in productivity improvement, this research was carried out to study if knowledge Asset Management (KAM) and inter-organizational relationship structure in supply chain (SC) have any impact on the performance of Australian beef industry leading into improving the competitiveness of the industry. We utilize concepts from organizational theories and marketing literature in agribusiness to develop the formative/reflective constructs, their measurement scales, and then use partial least squares (PLS) based structural equation modeling (SEM) to test our hypotheses. Data were collected through a telephone survey of a total of 315 firms including input suppliers, producers, processors, and retailers in the beef industry of Western Australia and Queensland. The PLS analysis reveals that ‘KAM, is the strongest predictor of SC performance, followed by ‘transaction climate’ and vertical coordination among the chain members. Result also shows that SC performance strongly influences the ‘competitiveness’ of the industry as a whole. Thus this study identifies significant strategic supply chain factors, which will enable the stakeholders to do appropriate planning and benchmarking to improve performance of Australian beef industry.