The empirical study of IT application on performance in china pharmaceutical distribution industry

Based on the literature review and unique feature of pharmaceutical distributors (Hereafter short for PDs) in china, this study proposed a model to explore the relationship among the key factors of IT application, S&OP (sales and operation planning) and firm performance. Grounded on the survey of more than 120 PDs, the paper has evaluated the impact of 3 key functional factors, information acquiring & mining, information integrating & sharing, and information automating & monitoring on firm performance of PDs with the path analysis. The outcome of study unveils that information acquiring & mining is positively related with financial performance, but information automating & monitoring is negatively related with financial performance. Information integrating & sharing plays a positive impact on financial performance only after the mediate factor, S&OP, works. In the end, this paper analyzes the problems existing in the informationlization process of PDs and advances constructive suggestions for the PDs to improve the level of their IT application and performance.