SUPPLY CHAIN DESIGN AND PERFOMANCE OF STATE OWNED SUGAR FIRMS IN KENYA

The primary goal of supply chain design is to up service quality and improve interaction levels between service providers and customers.The study was guided by four objectives aimed at establishing effect of facility location, Operation assessment, Inventory reduction on performance of state owned sugar firms and the moderating effect of organizational factors on relationship between supply chain design and performance of state-owned sugar manufacturing firms in Kenya. The research employed descriptive casual research design to provide cause effect relationship between study variables while applying simple stratified purposive sampling technique to collect data. The target population comprised all the four operating state owned sugar firms namely, Chemelil, Muhoroni, Sony and Nzoia constituting four (4) factory managers, four (4) Finance managers, five hundred and twenty four (524) Agriculture Extension Officers, four (4) Human Resource managers, One hundred and eighty (180) Agriculture services Personnel and four (4) Strategy and planning Managers totalling to 720. The researcher used questionnaires for data collection. Analysis of data was executed by descriptive and inferential statistics. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) helped in the analysis. Results presentation was in form of tables, figures, charts as well as histograms. Descriptive analysis facilitated the researcher get opinion percentages on the research issue. Hypothesis was tested at 95% confidence level. In determining the objectives, the hypotheses “ Hoi: Ho2; HO3 and HO4: have insignificant relationship to performance of state owned sugar manufacturing firms in Kenya” were set and tested sequentially; the hypotheses were rejected consecutively; hence facility location, Operation assessment, Inventory reduction and the moderating effect of organizational factors on the relationship between supply chain design and performance had significant positive effect on performance of selected sugar manufacturing firms in Kenya. Simple Regression Analysis helped determine the strength and direction of the relationship between study variables. Facility location, operational assessment, inventory reduction and the moderating effect of organizational factors contributed greatly in the improvement ofperformance of the selected State owned Sugar Firms.