SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT AND THE EFFICIENT RESPONSE TO CUSTOMERS' NEEDS IN RETAIL SECTOR

Current literature is abundant with researching various aspects of supply chain management in retail sector. Croatian retail sector has acknowledged the necessity of managing supply chains and implementation of various concepts but there is a lack of empiric investigation in Croatian supply chain management practices. This work aims to answer these questions: which supply chain components for responding to customer’s needs in managing retail supply chains are present, do larger companies implement more concepts, have more successful companies implemented more concepts and did foreign retailers implement more concepts than Croatian retailers. The results show the used concepts and their distribution in Croatian retail sector. The other three questions are posed in form of hypotheses. Only the first hypothesis is confirmed, i.e. that larger organizations use more supply chain management components. The other two hypotheses are rejected leading to a conclusion that more profitable retailers do not necessarily have more supply chain management components and foreign retailer do not use more supply chain components then their Croatian counterparts. This results lead to a conclusion that supply chain management in retail sector in Croatian ownership have adapted their supply chains to the levels needed for fierce competition, and that they do not lag behind foreign retailers.