Supply chain management (SCM) has emerged as an important strategic weapon for manufacturers seeking sustainable competitive advantage. As a result, collaboration between trading partners is replacing confrontation as the preferred approach to buyer-supplier relationships. The focus of SCM is the coordination and control of key business processes throughout the supply chain, within and between firms. As a result, researchers have sought to develop integrated models of supply chain management in which firms are treated as integral parts of four distinct flows - information, value-added products, funds and knowledge . This thesis has two main objectives: the first is to identify and to compare the partnership capabilities (benefits and processes) from the UK fresh produce industry with the benchmark indicators from the literature. The second one is to create a theoretical framework contributing to the theory of supply chain performance measurement. One main hypothesis, five complementary hypotheses and six exploratory questions were formulated in relartion to the primary research objective. In pursuit of the second objective a performance measurement model for fresh produce - MADCS was formulated. This model is supported by the performance measurement theory and by empirical results. A survey was choosen as the empirical research strategy. To capture the data 303 questionnaries were sent in February 2002 to UK fresh produce suppliers with turnover of more than £ 1 million. To test the hypotheses, chi-square, simple linear regression, factor analysis and logistics regression techniques were used. Overall, the results support the main hypothesis and three of the remaining sub-hypotheses. However, there results do not support the other two hypotheses.