Abstract: Supply chain management is one of the contemporary management philosophies that have spurred companies that seek competitiveness. Supply chain management focuses cost efficiency and customer satisfaction. In the case of the petroleum industry of Zimbabwe opacity has kept petroleum companie’s supply chain strategies weak and company competitiveness at bay. This study presents supply chain management practices of the petroleum industry namely: procurement, inventory, logistics, information technology and customer service. Petroleum companies in Zimbabwe are uncompetitive because the above supply chain management practices are ineffective. Therefore, uncompetitiveness of petroleum companies is associated with the fact that the companies have not embraced the supply chain management philosophy or that the philosophy is not properly managed. The study uses concurrent parallel mixed methods research design to simultaneously and independently collect qualitative and quantitative data from 102 petroleum industry supply chain practitioners. This design was chosen in order to have a wider and detailed in-depth understanding of petroleum companie’s critical success factors, supply chain performance factors and petroleum industry challenges. Qualitative research results show that, petroleum industry supply chain challenges emanate from poor industry structure, strategy, technology and environmental issues. Quantitative research results identified the need for collaboration, support, strategic partnerships and development of supply chain management strategies as the industry’s critical success factors. A regression analysis on supply chain performance established that developing effective supply chain management strategies and staff motivation, training and development were the two determinants of supply chain management performance. Both qualitative and quantitative research identified common petroleum industry challenges namely, high cost of product, Government regulation, lack of communication and cooperation among supply chain members and lack of support from associative organisations. The study recommends the development of effective supply chain management strategies at national, industry and company levels. Such strategies can focus on stabilising the business environment, identifying and removing bottlenecks along the supply chains, prioritising predictors of supply chain management performance in the allocation of resources and embarking on more supply chain management research benchmarking with international best practices.