LINKING SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT PRACTICES TO CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT OBJECTIVES: A PROPOSED FRAMEWORK

. This research proposes a framework linking supply chain management (SCM) practices to customer relationship management (CRM) objectives through better organizational performance. First, critical review was conducted to identify the relationship between SCM practices and organizational performance. Then, a systematic review of published research work on CRM objectives for last two decades was conducted with the purpose of identifying key variables for CRM objectives and their impact on SCM practices through managing organizational performance. The review revealed a set of main variables for CRM objectives (customer satisfaction and customer loyalty). Upon which, a theoretical framework has been developed linking SCM practices to CRM objectives through enhancing organizational performance. This work brings together the concepts of SCM practices and organizational performance. It also provides a comprehensive review on CRM objectives over a time span (2000–2019) in order to develop the framework between SCM practices and CRM objectives through better organizational performance. The proposed framework can help practitioners to understand SCM practices that can lead to better CRM and hence better organizational performance.


Introduction
Most of the organizations face constant changes that happen in the global market and often have to contend with the fierce competition, which helps them to adapt and implement new strategies and solutions for the revealed continuous challenges (Tidd & Bessant, 2018).The concept of Supply Chain (SC) has risen and the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) revolution encouraged the integration process between different organizations' entities throughout the world, as well as the integration between the SC entities of one autonomous organization (El Shoghari & Abdallah, 2016).
SC focus on improving overall performance and efficiency in the manufacturing and distribution sectors, through enhancing the relationships with their suppliers and customers, and these relationships are considered as a mechanism for improving organizational competitiveness and achieving more customer satisfaction.SC products and services to satisfy their needs, wants and desires.The process of dealing with existing customers and working on getting more customer is predominant and considered as a dilemma in commercial world.Installing CRM system for organizations can improve their current situation with customers and help them in challenging new ways of marketing and business in an efficient manner (Vijayaragavan, 2014).Therefore, every organization should have an exemplary CRM system to cope with all the business needs (Rahimi & Gunlu, 2016;Maxwell & Moin, 2018;Kingsley & Danielle, 2019).
Many organizations focus on retaining customers in extremely competitive market environment and consider it as their organizational key goal, many competing organizations are spending enormous time and money on developing long-term, cooperative relationships with their targeted customers; in order to achieve a superior performance in the marketplace (Bataineh et al., 2015).CRM systems is a kind of innovative system which considered as a key driver of higher productivity and long-term growth, which helps organizations to solve social SC challenges at the lowest possible cost (OECD, 2015).Innovation in Enterprises is at the core of inclusive growth strategies.Furthermore, recent developments in markets and technologies offer new opportunities for innovation and grow (OECD, 2017).
Organizations focus on expending much more effort in finding new ways to create value for their prompt customers and transforming the customer relationship into one of finding and partnering solution rather than one of selling and order taking (Ahmed, 2005).Indeed, the literature debating the management of multi-partner networks does not provide an overarching and comprehensive picture of the complexity of managing strategic multi-partner networks where the power structure is more widely distributed (Partanen & Moller, 2012).
The recent business environment is rising to be more complex and more challenging, therefore most of the organizations have to focus on their business operations to stay competitive in the marketplace.Accordingly, organizations must adopt Supply Chain Management (SCM) practices to improve their business operations as well as improving overall organizational performance (Mutuerandu & Iravo, 2014;Khalil et al., 2019).
It was found that the SCM has a positive impact on the organizational performance and competitive advantage.Also, the literature highlights that the SCM practices do not only affect the flexibility performance, but also the levels of output and the performance of the resources available within the organization.Furthermore, it was indicated that all components of the SCM positively affect the overall performance and the whole SC (Abdallah et al., 2014).Also, it was concerned that the SCM practices are being pitched towards achieving organizational goals and improving better overall organizational performance (Al-Madi, 2017).
The success of the business organizations in the marketplace depends on its great extend relationships with both customers and suppliers.Relationships with customers and suppliers are built up during considerable time in most industries (Gonzalez-Loureiro et al., 2015).SC responsiveness is an important indicator of how well the SC strategy fulfills its objectives since it denotes the ability of the SC to adopt to constant changing of customer needs and ultimately leads to elevated performance (Blome et al., 2013).
Due to high level of competition especially in the international marketplace, all the organizations' managers focus and seek a sustainable and defensible competitive advantage.The bases for success are abundant and the source of competitive advantage can be found in the ability of the organization to differentiate itself from the competitors in the eye of the customer.The organizations' managers should focus on the following strategic directions to reach a sustainable competitive advantage, which are: operate at a lower cost, increase profit and enhance the firms' SC responsiveness with respect to its customer (Melnyk et al., 2010).
The structure of this paper starts with the methodology employed to conduct the literature review which presented in section 1. Section 2 presents a critical review of the literature with the purpose of identifying the relationship between SCM practices and organizational performance, followed by a systematic review of published research work on CRM objectives for last two decades with the purpose of identifying key variables for CRM objectives and their impact on SCM practices through managing organizational performance.Section 3 proposes a theoretical framework linking SCM practices to CRM objectives.Finally, conclusion will be presented.

Methodology
This study aims at proposing a framework linking SCM practices to CRM objectives through better organizational performance, through answering the following research questions: -What is the relationship between supply chain management practices and organizational performance?-What are the key variables for customer relationship management objectives?-How the relationship between SCM practices, organizational performance and CRM objectives can be identified through their main key performance indicators?To investigate the aim of this study, firstly a critical review has been conducted to identify relationship between SCM practices and organizational performance, and the impact of enhancing OP on CRM objectives.Secondly, the author has designed a systematic review based on Tranfield et al. (2003) and Trafford and Leshem (2008) to gather all the relevant articles that investigate the impact of SCM practices on CRM objectives for selecting articles using 5 online databases (Emerald Insight, Scopus, Science Direct, SAGE Journal and Springer Link).The search was only applied to publication since 2000 till 2019 in CRM objectives to identify the main contribution for SCM practices to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.The keywords used were SCM practices, customer satisfaction, marketing relationship, inter-organizational customer relationship and customer loyalty.This selection was considered within title and abstract.
The running of the mentioned search engines resulted in 530 articles (264 articles from Emerald, 50 Scopus, 149 Science Direct, 65 Springer Link and 2 SAGE Journal).After a broad scanning for the titles of derived citations, this resulted in 92 articles.Then another broad screening for the abstract of selected titles, 54 articles was relevant to the study.Then a broad scanning for the selected articles will be examined through introduction, methodology and conclusion, this step resulted in 24 articles.Finally, a full text reading stage resulted in 11 articles.
The selected 11 articles were structured according to the criteria identified above, upon which the main variables for CRM objectives were identified.These variables will be presented in the next section to conclude with a theoretical framework linking SCM practices to CRM objectives through enhancing organizational performance.

Findings and discussion
Organizations are faced with number of obstacles and challenges as they strive to compete in the dynamic global markets.In order to remain competitive, organizations must understand the importance of SCM practices that helps in improving the overall organizational performance as well as coordinating between the whole SC partners to improve their mutual performance.Despite, the significant advances in research and practices, many organizations scuffle to understand the complex dilemma associated with coordinated planning and SC activities amongst all SC partners (Cook et al., 2011).

Linking supply chain management practices to organization performance
SCM role has become increasingly important for the organizations in highly competitive markets, and also in economic downturns.The competition happens among SCs versus SCs instead of firms versus firms.Therefore, a well-coordinated SC process is difficult for the competitors to imitate, since it becomes more difficult to compete on product level (Abrahamsson et al., 2015).In the marketplace, globalization and liberalization are becoming important factors for the growing competition along with dynamic consumer demand.A shift arose from a more technology-oriented view towards a point where collaboration and trust become important aspects for SC partners.In order to withstand competitive pressures and economic downturns, there should be an effective management of SC relationships (Chaudhuri et al., 2018).
Furthermore, SCM is no longer a support function for the execution of business strategy; it is clearly designed to drive the success of an organization and SCM becomes the core aspect of the overall strategy for the whole entire SC.Also, changes in the external environment (Socio-culture, political-legal, changing demand, technological, etc.) are the main reason for increasing marketplace uncertainty.Therefore, SC flexibility becomes more and more important (Rojo et al., 2018).Also, to stay competitive in the marketplace and global race, organizations must focus on understanding and practicing SCM as it becomes an essential prerequisite and it leads to enhance overall profitability (Aswini Priya et al., 2019).
The SCM concepts and practices have received increasing attention from managers, academicians and consultants.The understanding of SCM practices play a major role to keep organizations competitive in the global marketplace and to enhance their performance and profitability as well (Hamister, 2012).Therefore, it is required to understand the SCM practices for enhancing firm's competitiveness and improving SC performance and profits of firms (Somuyiwa et al., 2012).
SCM practices carried out organizational activities to make their entire SCM more effective.Moreover, SCM practices are viewed as both operational functions and activities of organization, which determine the SC effectiveness and efficiency (Sandhu et al., 2013).SCM has developed as a prominent field in delivering long-term competitiveness' strategies for organizations (Azadi et al., 2014).
There are different SCM practices employed by the researchers in the past to see its impact on the overall performance of any organization.In the past researches, it was found that all the SCM dimensions are strongly related to each other and all the dimensions of SCM practices also strongly related to firm performance (Banerjee & Mishra, 2017).Therefore, SCM practices have a great impact not only on overall performance, but also competitive advantage of an organization (Mwale, 2014).Consequently, SCM practices can act as a tool for establishing and retaining competitive edge and optimizing organizational efficiency for both the organization and the entire SC (Perry II, 2012).
In the literature, the dimensions of SCM practices have been discussed with different synonyms (Lenny Koh et al., 2007;Agus, 2011;Karimi & Rafiee, 2014;Gubran & Al-Madi, 2014;Mollel, 2015;Gorane & Kant, 2017;Aboneh, 2017;Al-Shboul et al., 2018;Rahman, 2018;Kumar & Kushwaha, 2018).But all of the different perspectives of SCM practices dimensions converge in the fact that their aim is to maximize the organizations' overall performance.The SCM practices construct used in this research amalgamates into six dimensions extracted from the previous studies and shown in Table 1.
From the literature review, it is ascertained that the common organizational performance measures are divided into financial and non-financial measures.Organizational performance is a hybrid framework that demonstrates the overall performance of the organization.Specially, it refers to how well the organization achieves its financial and market goals (Li et al., 2006).It was suggested that to achieve better organizational performance, it is important to align and link SC operations to financial metrics (Brown & Fraser, 2006).Therefore, it is an important aspect to investigate the effect of SCM practices on financial performance (Al-Shboul et al., 2018).
The common financial performance measures used are market share, return on investment (ROI), return on assets (ROA), organizations' profitability and financial liquidity, while the non-financial measures are divided into two main sectors which are operation performance and market performance.The operational performance should focus on improving the logistics activities within the SC, while the market performance measures are market growth, overall competitive position and sales volume (Gawankar et al., 2017).
Based on the previous studies, the financial performance indicators will be adopted to measure organizational performance through financial statements by identifying the return on investment through assets utilization, cost control and revenue maximization in this study, while the operational performance will be adopted to measure internal logistics performance as it relates to its ability to deliver goods and services in the exact quantities and at exact time requires by customers through main constructs which are delivery speed, delivery dependability, responsiveness, flexibility and order fill capacity in this study.
In reviewing and consolidating the literature, six main distinctive constructs are selected for measuring the SCM practices and other two constructs are selected for measuring the organizational performance.The six constructs the SCM practices cover upstream (strategic supplier partnership), sides of a supply chain, information flow across a supply chain (Level of information sharing and quality of information sharing), the internal supply chain process (postponement and lean practices) and finally downstream (customer relationship).While the two constructs of organizational performance are financial and operational performance.
-Strategic Supplier Partnership: Strategic partnerships with suppliers are organized efforts to establish a long-term relationship between the organization and its suppliers.It is designed to harness the strategic and operational capabilities of the participating entities to help them gain substantial ongoing benefits (Mwale, 2014).This relationship is undertaken to establish and manage the organizations' network with qualified suppliers.This relationship encompasses all the operations required to maximize current performance of suppliers.Also, it emphasizes direct long-term relationship with suppliers and promotes mutual planning and problem-solving activities.Supplier organizations can work together to minimize useless time and effort (Li et al., 2006).An effective supplier partnership can be a crucial part of a leading SC (Mwale, 2014).Additionally, Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) helps organizations to gain access to valuable resources and supplies, reduce overall operational costs, enhance organizational flexibility, ensure better quality, implement integrated technology, and thus improve organizational performance as well as SC performance (Amoako-Gyampah et al., 2019).-Customer Relationship: Customer relationship is the key element in SCM practices implementation in any organization (Hussain et al., 2014).In this era, the world focuses more on enormous growth of customized products and services that required organizations to establish long-term relationships with their customer for the sake of their survival (Jie et al., 2007).Close attention on customer relationship helps organizations to differentiate their products from rival competitors and retain customer satisfaction and loyalty (Bratić, 2011).-Level of Information Sharing: Information sharing refers to organizations' ability to easily and securely exchange their knowledge, expertise and information within their SC partners.The share of information in the SC interactive framework encompasses information between direct partners and all SC networks.One of the most significant tools for creating and integrated and coordinated SCM is information sharing (Ibrahim & Hamid, 2014).-Quality of Information Sharing: Quality of information sharing consists of factors such as the authenticity, timeliness, adequacy and credibility of the shared information (Moberg et al., 2002).In addition, it is important to share the accuracy of market information with suppliers, where decisions are made on the basis of market information gathered.Sharing information between SCM partners should be accurate, revised, authentic, timely and reliable from a reliable source (Li et al., 2006).-Postponement: Postponement refers to managing the internal SC processes, and is known as the activity of transferring one or more operations or activities (making, sourcing and delivering) to a much later point in the SC (Li et al., 2006).Postponement allows organizations to be more agile and flexible in designing different products' versions to meet their different preferences and different customers' need and to distinguish products or to modify demand function (Waller et al., 2000).-Lean Practices: Lean is referring to a method that uses less input to manufacture at a mass production speed, while offering more variety of products to the end customers.It is considered as the reduction of wasted time and resources in the manufacturing process.The core principles of lean practices are that these practices can work synergistically to build a simplified, high-quality framework that delivers finished products at the rate of customer demand with little or no wastage time and resources (Woldemichael, 2012).Number of studies indicated the relationship between SCM practices and organizational performance.Where organizational performance refers to the performance of organizations according to its priorities, mission, value and objectives; these activities may include traditional performance metrics within a business unit (Cho & Dansereau, 2010).In addition, it is considered as the actual performance results of an organization as compared to the organization's intended outputs (Tomal & Jones, 2015).The organizational potential success depends heavily on its organizational performance, which identify its ability to execute plans and strategies successfully to accomplish ultimate organizational objectives (Randeree & Al Youha, 2009).
Major findings found from these studies justified presence of positive relationship between SCM practices and organizational performance, as the higher levels of SCM practice implementation can lead to higher levels of organizational performance (Fantazy et al., 2010;Choon Ho, 2011;Ijaz, 2014;Mollel, 2015;Gawankar et al., 2017;Wijetunge, 2017;Kumar & Kushwaha, 2018;Rahman, 2018).Figure 1 identifies the main SCM practices and their link to organizational performance measures.
The coming subsection will focus on a systematic review on customer relationship management objectives and how it will be linked to supply chain management practices and organizational performance.

Customer relationship management objectives
Previous studies have shown that organizational performance of different industries can positively affect customer satisfaction, and thus level of customer loyalty.It was argued that poor organizational and operational performance resulted in negative impact on customer loyalty (Kumar et al., 2011).The most important thing to be done by organizations about reducing customer satisfaction is to adopt customer-centered practices for each customer's needs and values.Organizations can achieve better customer loyalty by handling and treating different customers in different manners (Khadka & Maharjan, 2017).
Once the organizational performance enhanced, customer satisfaction and loyalty took place.Customer satisfaction is considered as the main factor in customer loyalty, which primarily relies on the level of quality provided by organizations (Rahman, 2014).The retention of customers is being very fluid.When customers are dissatisfied, they switch to products and services offered by competitors.Organizations should deliver high-quality products and services with reasonable prices in order to enhance their overall performance and competitive position which promote to customer loyalty (Kocoglu & Kirmaci, 2012).
There are several studies investigated the relationship between organizational performance and customer satisfaction and loyalty.Thus, it was concluded that there is a positive significant relationship between organizational performance and customer satisfaction and loyalty (Ali et al., 2013;Hassan & Abdul Rehman, 2016;Khadka & Maharjan, 2017;Mohammed et al., 2017).Moreover, SCM practices help in business activities and organizational performance which will retain their customers (Hassan & Abdul Rehman, 2016).
Organizations are expected to be smarter than ever to succeed in today's dynamic market and changing environment.One of the modern marketing methods that organizations try to use in a successful manner is CRM.For this purpose, the use of CRM systems that have arisen form recent advances in information technology is very significant.The goals of these systems are to try to fulfill the needs and demands of consumers better and quicker, establish customer relations, attract loyal customers and sustain the organization by properly gathering and arranging customer data.Therefore, CRM is considered as one of the main dimensions of SCM practices and leads to faster improve in organizational performance, which results in reaching CRM main objectives (Ghasemi et al., 2017).
Customer satisfaction described as the desired outcome of service encounters that involves an evaluation of whether the service has met the customers' needs and expectations (Orel & Kara, 2014).In order to reach customer satisfaction, the organizations must enhance several variables between organizations and the customers, which are trust, commitment, communication, competence and deals with conflicts, which will be illustrated below in details.All of these variables will increase the emotional attachment between the products and/or services offered by the organization and the customers which lead to increase transaction specific satisfaction (Bajaj et al., 2005;Prasad & Aryasri, 2008;Ndubisi et al., 2011;Srivastava & Rai, 2018).
-Trust: is considered the most essential ingredient in any relationship.It is also the key arbitrator of commitment.Trust is one of the most critical aspects in recognizing the strength of a quality marketing relationship and maximizing customer loyalty.It is stressed that the promise principle that preserves and strengthens customer relationships is an important part of the partnership marketing strategy.-Commitment: is also one of the key elements for understanding the strength of marketing relationship quality.Commitment has been conceptualized to be an attachment between two parties to maintain a relationship between the organization and customers.-Communication: is an important variable that plays an indispensable role in the relationship marketing by sharing information between organization and customers, which increase level of transparency and satisfaction for the customers.Communication is often known as a pre-defined state that is required for a successful partnership to occur.
-Competence: is known as the buyer's perception of the supplier's technological and commercial competence.Competence is the awareness of the retailer on the buyer's market, their ability to offer guidance on the ongoing sector, the ability to help the buyer manage orders, and the ability to provide appropriate materials for sales promotion.-Conflict Handling: is considered as the ability of the suppliers to minimize the negative consequences of manifest and potential conflicts.-Transaction Specific Satisfaction: is based on emotional attachment of the customers, simply it is the role and effect of emotion in determining the shape and intensity of customer response towards the organization.Transaction specific satisfaction is considered mainly by reflecting on the emotional reactions of customers to specific service characteristics or service experiences and implies that businesses relate specific psychological responses to the results of accurate service elements or combinations of them.Customer loyalty is considered as key results for customer satisfaction and also a significant source of competitive advantage.Customer loyalty can be understood as the customer's actions towards a single product or service over its rivals and industry replacements (Rai & Srivastava, 2014).Customer loyalty was mainly seen as a double-fold term with the core aspects of repeat buying intentions and optimistic customer attitude.Customers may demonstrate their degree of loyalty by exhibiting a good outlook or by taking favorable acts or by actively assessing and seeking specific service that is worth adhering to the organization (Srivastava et al., 2012).Customer loyalty consists of three main attributes to demonstrate the level of customer loyalty which are preferences, patronage and premium towards the organization (Srivastava & Rai, 2018).
-Preferences: stand for customers' decision to select a single service or commodity from a given company over other alternatives in terms of repurchase and retention.-Patronage: brings forth the strength of the relationship between the company and its customers in the willingness to get associated with the organization actively.This level of loyalty is considered as strong preferences for the customers, increases word of mouth and the customers' willingness to recommend for others and altruism.-Premium: points towards a conscious choice of opting for the products or services of a particular company offered even at higher prices or with long waiting time.This level is considered as the highest level of customer loyalty.Based on the previous discussion, Figure 2 will illustrate the key variables for measuring customer relationship management objectives By integrating Figure 1 and Figure 2, this study can propose a theoretical framework that links SCM practices (strategic supplier partnership, customer relationship, level of information sharing, quality of information sharing, postponement and lean practices) and CRM objectives (customer satisfaction and customer loyalty) through managing organizational performance (financial performance and operational performance.The following figure (Figure 3) illustrates the theoretical framework of this study.
The previous figure illustrates the relationship between SCM practices, organizational performance and CRM objectives.The theoretical framework incorporates SCM practices as an independent variable with its different KPIs (strategic supplier partnership, customer relationships, level of information sharing, quality of information sharing, postponement and lean practices).Organizational performance is used as a moderate variable including both financial and operational performance, which finally leads to CRM objectives as the dependent variable with its main drivers; customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
Based on the proposed framework, it was proved that enhancing SCM practices will lead to better organizational performance (Aboneh, 2017;Al-Shboul et al., 2017;Wijetunge, 2017;Kumar & Kushwaha, 2018;Rahman, 2018) and then, better customer satisfaction as a result of combination of trust, commitment, communication, competence and conflict handling.This will lead directly to an increase of the emotional attachments of the customers towards the product or service which is translated to transaction specific satisfaction (purchase).Therefore, customer loyalty take place as a result of customer satisfaction in the shape of preference (repurchase intention, switching resistance and exclusive purchase), patronage (strong preferences, willingness to recommend and altruism) and premium, which is considered as the ultimate level of customer loyalty (price insensitivity, exclusivity and identification)  (Sharifi & Esfidani, 2014;Bilgihan & Bujisic, 2015;Filipe et al., 2017;Mbango & Mmatli, 2019).

Conclusions
This research is a work in process.The findings at this stage represents a general theoretical framework linking the SCM practices to CRM objectives through organizational performance.This framework can be used as a tool for enhancing customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
And this framework will be further developed based on analysis interviews collected from SC managers in different industrial sector.The originality of this work lies in bringing together the concepts of SCM practices and organizational performance.It also provides a comprehensive review on CRM objectives over a time span (2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019) in order to develop the framework between SCM practices and CRM objectives through better organizational performance.Moreover, this paper provides a theoretical model that can be used by practitioners to test the relationship between supply chain management practice and CRM objectives for the purpose of improving organizational performance.The future agenda for this research listed as follows: -The theoretical framework could be validated on different geographical regions.-The proposed framework can be used from different perspectives as SMEs sector beside large enterprises.-The proposed framework could be investigated on different sectors (manufacturing/service) in different geographical regions.

Figure 1 .
Figure1.The relationship between supply chain management practices and organizational performance

Table 1 .
Main dimensions for supply chain management practices Figure 2. Main variables for measuring customer relationship management objectives