Global Advanced Research Journal of Management and Business Studies Vol. 1(3) pp. 070-074, April, 2012 Available online http://garj.org/garjmbs/index.htm Copyright © 2012 Global Advanced Research Journals Full Length Research Paper Examining supply chain practice in Egyptian sme firms Sayed M. ElSayed Elkhouly, Salah El Din Ismail, Gharib Husien, Sarah El Sayed El Shazely, Ain Shams University-Egypt, Helwan University Accepted 29 March 2012 This research examines supply chain management practice in SME firms in Egypt. A well designed survey include several items explaining the main characteristics of supply chain management which distributed to over three hundred executives working in different industry in Egypt. The response rate was over 64% representing all different industries. Statistical analysis was used to analyze the data and test the four major hypotheses in this study. The results indicate significant difference in only one hypothesis. Recommendations of this study include the following first Egyptian manufacturing companies specifically public sector should build strong IT infrastructure in order to facilitate the information sharing internal and external the firms especially, with customers. Second Egyptian manufacturing companies should ensure and facilitate the relationship between suppliers and retailers in order to increase information flow within the supply chain. Third Egyptian manufacturing companies specifically public sector that suffer from a lot of barriers facing application of lean manufacturing system in their companies, so, they should benchmark the successful lean manufacturing systems from private sector in order to enhance their lean abilities and their trading partners abilities also as to enhance performance of supply chain in the public sector manufacturing companies. Keywords: Supply chain, SME and Firm. INTRODUCTION Many researchers have studied supply chain management practices. Tan, Lyman and Wisner (2002) studied supply chain practices from a strategic perspective. Jeong and Hong (2006) studied supply chain practices of small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs from a business growth perspective. Wong, Arlbjorn and Johansen (2005) examined supply chain practices in toy supply chains. Sahay and Mohan (2003) looked at supply chain practices in Indian industry. McMullan (1996) studied supply chain practices in Asian Pacific companies. According to the above studies and for many others, it can be concluded that there is a lack in literature review on supply chain management practices in Egyptian manufacturing companies which leads to indicating the following supply chain practices in order to be used for formulating the research hypotheses and the research Corresponding author Email: sayed_elkhouly@yahoo.com questionnaire for collecting data. Therefore, supply chain management practices can be categorized as the following: Customer relationship practices mainly focused on: According to Simchi-levi, Kaminsky and Simchi-levi (2004), they argued that the ability to offer what the customer wants and needs is a basic requirement to which supply chain management contributes by creating availability and selection. Also, they mentioned that Marshall Fisher called it the market mediation function of the supply chain (This function is distinct from the supply chain physical function of converting raw materials into goods and shipping them through the chain to the customer). The costs associated with the market mediation function occur when there are differences between supply and demand. If the supply exceeds demand, there are inventory costs throughout the supply chain; if demand exceeds supply, there are lost sales and possibly lost market share. If product demand is predictable, as in functional items such as milk, market mediation is not a major issue. Clearly, efficient supply chains for functional items can