Prioritising the alternatives for flexibility in supply chains

Abstract

In the era of globalisation, requirements of customer are changing very fast. Product life cycle is shortening. Organisations are under pressure to reduce cost, delivery time, improve reliability of product by changing their process continuously. Supply chain management has become integral part of strategy for most of the organisations in meeting these challenges. Success of supply chain depends on effective strategy for improving coordination among the members to make it more responsive for market needs by optimising available resources. In this context, supply chain needs to be flexible. Based on the literature, it is observed that overall flexibility of supply chain depends upon suppliers’ flexibility, manufacturing flexibility and customers’ flexibility. Other sub-factors affecting flexibility may be product and process design, capacity planning, logistic management, suppliers’ capabilities and nature of customers. This study has tried to prioritise flexibility alternatives by analytical network process approach. Input for this analysis is based on four Indian case studies, which are briefly described in the paper. These organisations had been very active in improving flexibility of their supply chains. Findings of the study report that organisations should give top priority for improving manufacturing flexibility followed by customers’ and suppliers’ flexibility.

Keywords:

• supply chain
• flexibility
• performance
• case study
• analytic network process

Acknowledgements

Authors thank anonymous reviewers for their constructive and helpful comments for improving quality and content of the paper.