The paradox of variables' effect on distribution channel type: the case of packaged milk producers in Egypt

Mr. Mostafa Bakr successfully defended his DBA thesis at MSM on the 14th of June 2018 titled: The Paradox of Variables’ Effect on Distribution Channel Type: The Case of Packaged Milk Producers in Egypt.

The DBA program of MSM helped Mr. Bakr to apply a more structured approach when making decisions. “It was common that I used to take business decisions relying on intuition only. In some extreme cases I used to take the decision first, then I had to find a way to justify it among a set of different alternatives.” Thanks to the DBA program Mr. Bakr developed his decision-making skills and learned to rely more on data analysis and statistical inferences.

In his DBA thesis Mr. Bakr studied the distribution channel structure of packaged dairy products in Egypt. The Logistic Regression results indicated that different variables have an opposite effect on the channel type. Channel managers are recommended to assign higher weights to “Shelf Life” and “Customer Concentration”. The variables “Safety” and “Security” were empirically tested for the first time as per the scan to previous empirical results, and were found to be significant for two milk categories.

Channel managers are recommended to group variables and assign different weights to different groups using tools like ARGUS for channel selection. The tool’s predictive capacity was found to be high when fed with appropriate variables’ weights. Integrating the Business Generation Model to the channel decision-making process was found useful in order to link the channel decision-making with a key activity like capability building.