With the goal on identifying the relationship between the standardization on the beef buying and selling by supermarkets, the coordination of suppliers and the size of the firm, a survey on supermarket firms in the state of São Paulo and in the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte was developed. A structured questionnaire was elaborated with the additional purpose of revealing the knowledge level of new retail technologies and the supermarket purchase behaviour of beef. Using contingency tables analysis, three focus variables were related and it was investigated the statistical dependence relationship between them. The results lead to the conclusion that there is a strong statistical dependence relationship between the coordination of suppliers and the size of the firm, and between coordination and standardization on the beef buying and selling process, but not between the standardization and the size of the firm. Moreover, there was demonstrated the knowledge of the most common practices and the best practices of standardization on the beef buying and selling process, and of the most common practices and the best practices of coordination of suppliers. Finally, the results lead to the conclusion that the implementation of managerial tools like supply chain management is difficult to be performed on the short run, essentially because of the low diffusion of the standardization practices between all supermarket size categories and the difficulties imposed by the low knowledge of new retail managerial tools and technologies.
supply chain management; standardization; beef supply chain
