Empirical analysis of the relationship between Supply Chain Management and business performance: Case of companies in the cotton sector in Mali.

As part of a national policy favoring the local processing of agricultural products, several companies have been created in the cotton sector in Mali. According to the 2014 report of the National Council of the Malian Patronage, several Malian companies have difficulties in terms of performance. The reasons for this insufficiency are: (difficult access to financing, poor management, poor quality of products, lack of information, etc.). We can summarize this situation by a lack of practices in Supply Chain Management. The objective of this section was to empirically evaluate the impact of supply chain management on the performance of companies operating in the cotton sector in Mali. We favored an approach that links four SCM practices across a variety of dimensions of performance. In our methodology, we used an econometric regression analysis. At the end of this study, it should be remembered that the practices of the management of the supplier relationship and the exchange and sharing of information constitute the two most productive supply chain management practices in the cotton sector in Mali. In addition, among the dimensions of performance considered, financial performance and customer satisfaction are the two most sensitive variants of SCM practices. Key words: the company, Performance, Supply Chain Management, information, customer, cotton sector