CATEGORY MANAGEMENT PRACTICES AND SUPPLY CHAIN PERFORMANCE OF SUPERMARKETS IN NAIROBI

Supply chain Category management is a relatively new concept in Kenya and it has been deployed by a few multinational retail firms to ensure commonly used goods and services are not separately purchased by the various functional teams but are sourced through a single process able to leverage on its total spend in the market for the relevant category. The resultant benefits are, better value for money through aggregation of demand, standardizing of specification, enhanced supplier relationship, proper and cost effective procurement skill utilization in market watching and analysis. Many supermarkets are at crossroads, either to continue doing the transactional sourcing, offer strategic sourcing solution to the business or broaden their approach to include category management. This study sought to determine the effect of category management practices on supply chain performance of supermarkets in Nairobi. The objectives of the study were to establish the category management practices used by Supermarkets in Nairobi, Kenya and to establish the relationship between category management practices and supply chain performance of supermarkets in Nairobi. The independent variable was category management practices as measured by Planogramming, product assortment, in store/shopper marketing, promotion and pricing. Supply chain performance was the dependent variable which the study sought to explain and it was measured by cost reduction, responsiveness, flexibility, service delivery and efficiency of asset utilization. Primary data was collected from supermarkets in Nairobi with the aid of questionnaires. The number of questionnaires that were administered was 80. A total of 77 questionnaires were properly filled and returned. This represented an overall successful response rate of 96.25%. The study employed a descriptive research design and a multiple linear regression model was used to analyze the relationship between the variables. Statistical package for social sciences version 21 was used for data analysis purposes.