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Organisations are expected to develop sound strategies relating to their core operations capabilities of cost efficiency, quality, delivery, flexibility and innovation, to gain and maintain competitive advantage. However, there is a paucity of specific models that can be used to explain and predict how organisations combine and use these capabilities. Previous research has primarily focused on the 'trade-off' and the 'cumulative capabilities' models. In this study, data from an international sample of 1438 manufacturing plants are used to explore other models that organisations are using in addition to the two predominant models. This analysis shows that, in practice, the trade-off model is not used, but the cumulative capabilities model is used extensively. Further, our proposed new models, the 'threshold', 'average' and 'multiple', are prevalent in many plants. Also, a small proportion of the plants have in place the 'uncompetitive' model. In terms of relative effectiveness, there are no significant differences between the models with respect to several measures of operational performance. Overall, this study provides empirical evidence that there are other operations strategy models beyond the trade-off and cumulative capabilities dichotomy that organisations deploy.

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Leagile is an approach to managing production and supply chain excellence that is a hybrid of conventional Lean and Agile thinking and methods. This paper reviews the extant literature relating to Leagile and in the process identifies important opportunities for advancing research. Although several review works exist for lean operations (e.g. Jasti & Kodali, 2015), this paper seeks to be the first to specifically review Leagile research. Following review of recent, literature reviews (Ho et al, 2015;Jasti & Kodali, 2015), a seven-step process was developed to undertake this research. A total of 225 articles were reviewed, resulting in 53 articles where Leagile was a central theme. Findings include and reveal that Leagile is recognised as important for business excellence (Aykuz, 2014) but under-investigated; papers in high quality publications have declined to date; 73% of research articles used qualitative research methods. Research that involves practical studies comparing the paradigms lean, agile and leagile, tends to better understand the difficulties and better implementation practices of the theme. The service, SME and health sectors are particularly fitting for further work given their competitive, progressive and relatively unexplored nature.