A review of empirical research on manufacturing flexibility

Abstract

Manufacturing flexibility is widely recognized as a critical component to achieving a competitive advantage in the marketplace. A comprehensive look at the empirical research pertaining to manufacturing flexibility highlights the very fragmented nature of this body of work. We present a comprehensive contingency‐based framework for examining the content related issues involving the relationships and variables included in past studies. We also examine several important research design/methodology issues (e.g., sampling, data collection and measurement) and propose solutions to some identified problems.

Operational Flexibility and Financial Hedging: Complements or Substitutes?

“…As for postponement flexibility, potential measures could be based on capital intensity or average capacity utilization (the larger the capital intensity, or the higher the average capacity utilization, the lower the postponement flexibility). A survey of the empirical literature on flexibility that discusses various methodological issues regarding validity and reliability of flexibility measurements can be found in Vokurka and O'Leary-Kelly (2000). As far as empirical measures of financial hedging are concerned, there are public data on firms' derivative positions as well as a large body of empirical literature on the subject (e.g., Guay and Kothari 2003).…”

Information System Flexibility and the Cost Efficiency of Business Processes

“…The concept of flexibility is of significant interest to scholars of various research areas, most notably manufacturing (Gupta and Goyal, 1989;Vokurka and O'Leary-Kelly, 2000), economics (Carlson, 1989), strategic management (Evans, 1991), and IS (Allen and Boynton, 1991). Research efforts have focused on the phenomenon of flexibility (Byrd and Turner, 2000;Sethi and Sethi, 1990), and on the impact of flexible technologies on organizations (Byrd and Turner, 2001;Palanisamy and Sushil, 2003) and organizational processes (Maier, 1981;Stigler, 1939).…”

A Systematic Literature Review of Flexible E-Procurement Marketplace

“…Vokurka and O'Leary-Kelly [105] categorized these challenges of the organization into four different categories: organizational, environmental, strategic and technical in EPM.…”