Approaches to Manage Supply-Chain Breakdown and the Operational Performance of Some Selected Manufacturing Enterprises in Katsina State, Nigeria

Several scholarly studies have been conducted to establish relationships between SC breakdown and performance of manufacturing enterprises without any serious attention on the relationship between approaches to manage SC breakdown and operational performance of enterprises. Therefore, this paper provides an empirical analysis of the causal relationships between approaches to manage SC breakdown and operational performance of manufacturing enterprises. The approaches to manage supply chain breakdown are proactive risk management, system flexibility and system wide-disruption awareness while the operational performance metrics include quality, dependability, flexibility, return on investment, lower costs. A Kendall coefficient of concordance is applied to primary data collected through structured questionnaire in five –point Likert Scale format to test the hypotheses via SPSS version 21. Results based on cross-sectional survey data from randomly selected 105 enterprises show evidence of a strong positive statistically significant impact of effective strategies to manage SC breakdown on operational performance of manufacturing enterprises with kendall’s tau-c statistical value of .938 and p-value ? .05. Subject to appreciable effect on operational performance, this study suggests that enterprises stakeholders (suppliers, manufacturers, distributors/wholesalers and retailers) should consciously embrace SC strategies - proactive risk management approach, system flexibility and system wide-disruption awareness programme and enforce its implementation if SC breakdown must be mitigated and operational efficiency must be enhanced. Therefore, the research concludes that enterprises would become less vulnerable to SC breakdown if they adequately utilize strategies of SCM.