Purpose
– An agile supply chain (ASC) includes companies that are operationally linked to each other, such as supply, design, manufacturing and distribution centers that respond and react quickly and effectively to change markets. Information systems and technology have a main role in achieving this objective. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between information integration, information infrastructure flexibility and the ASC in the Iranian power plant industry (IPPI).
Design/methodology/approach
– The quantitative method was employed in this study. Survey questionnaires were sent to 87 managers in the IPPI to examine the relationship between information integration, information infrastructure flexibility, and the ASC.
Findings
– The final results indicated that information sharing and responsibility were strongly related with the ASC; accessibility and connectivity had important relations with the ASC; while the relationships between compatibility and adaptableness as IT flexibility variables and ASC were positive but not significant.
Research limitations/implications
– This study focussed on the impact of IT on the IPPI specifically companies that manufacture boilers, electronic control tools, turbines, turbine blades, generators and other power plant-related components.
Practical implications
– A new research model was developed to assess the impact of the interrelationships among IT capabilities and the ASC and results should assist managers as well as academicians.
Originality/value
– An investigation was carried out through this study based on the current situation in IPPI to empirically examine and evaluate the effect of IT integration and flexibility on ASC. Besides, a very limited number of studies have been done on the implementation of information technology in the IPPI.
In the business environment, information technology (IT) plays an important role for firms' performance. It provides information flow that makes the supply chain more robust and resilient without undermining its efficiency. Smart systems use artificial intelligence methods for solving problems and facilitating decision‐making through rule‐based deduction. Accordingly, these systems can present specialists' skills and simulate their thinking process. The primary goal of expert systems is to implement knowledge acquisition process by converting knowledge to wisdom. This process is vital for critical decision‐making regarding important issues such as determining necessities of a particular contract. Companies use professional liability insurance of the products and services to ensure the purchasers and prevent potential losses. Although this practice is highly prevalent, there is not any particular procedure for measuring necessities of contracts. The main purpose of this paper is to design a fuzzy expert system for measuring the necessities of professional contracts regarding insurance coverage and improve the supply chain management using IT. This system can measure and report these obligations, considering specifications of each project. Taking into perspective variety of professional services/products, we consider software as a type of professional contracts, extract its important indices and give it to the system as the input. After the necessary stages, the system produces a proper response and presents the generated response to the user. The software of this expert system is web based, and there are four operating layers in its architecture. We implemented this program in MS Visual Studio Framework with C#.NET programming language. Moreover, we implemented MS SQL‐Server Database Management.
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