The article analyses the logistics strategy of Brazilian companies measuring the impact of business characteristics on production and distribution decisions. A survey of the companies ranked by the news magazine Exame was conducted to test the four policies advanced by Pagh and Cooper (1998) against several characteristics of products, operations and demand. The policies combine inventory centralization/decentralization and made to order/made to stock decisions. Models were developed using multivariate techniques, including simple and multinomial regression. The results allowed the ranking and quantification of relationships previously found in the literature. These results might be useful when managers have to make logistics decisions.
Logistics; strategy; production; physical distribution; finished products