AN EXPORT SUPPLY CHAIN MATURITY INDEX FOR CORRIDOR-LEVEL DIAGNOSIS: EVIDENCE FROM A TEXTILE EXPORTER IN A LANDLOCKED ECONOMY

Exporters in landlocked economies serve markets that differ sharply in reliability, speed, and cost, yet performance is normally reported as a firm-level average that conceals this dispersion. Composite indices of supply-chain efficiency developed to date use either the country or the enterprise as their unit of measurement, and firm-level digital maturity scales assess technological capability rather than delivered outcomes; neither supports decisions about which export direction should receive scarce managerial resources. This article develops the Export Supply Chain Maturity Index (ESCMI), a weighted composite whose unit of observation is the individual export corridor. Four non-redundant dimensions—on-time-in-full delivery, perfect order rate, order cycle time, and cost-to-serve—are normalised, weighted 0.35/0.35/0.20/0.10, and aggregated into a score from 0 to 100, which is then mapped onto four maturity phases. Applied to a complete census of the 2025 export operations of an Uzbek textile manufacturer (N = 50 consignments; seven corridors), the index separates the portfolio into three clusters: Turkmenistan (89.1), Tajikistan (86.0), and Kazakhstan (85.7) in the optimised phase; Russia (82.6) managed; Belarus (56.6) developing; and Turkey (26.3) and Iran (24.2) reactive. The Russian corridor demonstrates the diagnostic value of aggregation: it records perfect reliability on both service indicators, yet remains below the optimised threshold because cycle time and cost are structurally constrained. Sensitivity analysis across four weight specifications leaves the three-cluster structure invariant, while the boundary at 85 points proves weight-sensitive for three corridors scoring within four points of it. Validation is provided by the correlation structure and by an external criterion: the two corridors placed in the reactive phase account for 12 per cent of consignments, but generated three of the five late deliveries recorded during the year.