Enhancing Sustainable Competitiveness to Thai SME by Using Logistics and Supply Chain Management

Thai SME firms are a major driven to Thailand's economic growth in many decades. The questioning issue is how to sustainably create competitive advantage to Thai SME firms. Thai government continuously boosted Thailand's economic growth through many projects. One of dominant policy is how to improve logistics capacity building and efficiency of Thai SMEs. The literature review revealed that logistics knowledge and application have been overlooked. Thai government's policy has not provided an importance to logistics management as a strategic tool. Further, studies on logistics and supply chain in Thai SME firms are very limited in theoretical perspective. The objective of the paper is to examine status for adopting logistics strategies to Thai SMEs and effectiveness. A total of 148 questionnaires were sent out and 126 usable completed questionnaires were received, with response rate of 85.1 percent. In-depth interviews were used specifically to obtain deeper insight from 20 Thai SME owners. The hypothesis is statistically tested using SPSS version 14.0.0. Descriptive statistics and multiple regressions were used to test hypothesis. The results indicated that there are strong and positive relationships between SME firms' logistics implementation and enhancing their competitive advantage. In addition, factors have strongly contributed and effected logistics operations and implementation. The implications reflect that adopting an effective logistics strategy offers opportunities to create sustainable competitive advantage. Research in area of building logistics awareness, including how to encourage Thai SME firms to recognize on its effectiveness would be further conducted.