Abstract
Intermediaries hold an essential role in the agricultural supply chain. They act as connectors between producers and buyers, facilitating the movement of raw materials and the management of information flow. The ability of intermediaries to translate stakeholders’ requirements into value-creation activities is critical to ensuring smooth flow across the network. This study investigated what combinations of intermediary capabilities affect supply chain performance in the context of supply reliability. Four theoretically grounded conditions derived from the literature: resource control, network brokerage, operational efficiency, and compliance capability. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is applied to ten purposively selected cases of palm oil companies in Indonesia. As a developmental paper, initial configurational findings are reported, and the identified capability combinations are interpreted against the theoretical framework. The paper contributes to supply chain management literature by demonstrating that intermediary performance is not determined by a single capability but by specific combinations of conditions