Strategic assessment of the supply chain interface: a beverage industry case study

Competition in the beverage industry is increasing on all fronts (advertising, price, product proliferation, service, etc.). As a result, distributors need to understand what is important to retailers and assess how they and their competitors are meeting those needs in the supply chain. In this paper a performance system is proposed to assess the distributor‐retailer interface based on the integration of a number of concepts including customer service, relationship exchanges, competitive benchmarking, order winners (consumer preference perceptions), and portfolio analysis.Various performance matrices are constructed which indicate the importance level and service effectiveness for categories of service provided to retailers. These importance/ performance matrices provide a basis for distributors to develop marketing strategies for categories of retailers, as well as for individual retailers.