Antecedents and enablers of supply chain reconfigurability and its effect on performance

Abstract

The reconfiguration of supply chain is becoming a crucial concept used to deal with market disruptions and changes such as COVID 19 pandemic, demand uncertainty, new technologies, etc. It can be defined as the ability of the supply chain to change its structure and functions in order to adapt to new changes. Its assessment requires an understanding of its quantitative factors to provide indicators that are easy to interpret. Effective reconfigurability assessment can be achieved by measuring quantitatively its six characteristics (modularity, integrability, convertibility, diagnosability, scalability and customization). This paper aims at identifying the quantitative factors of each characteristic and their inter-relationships by using Total Interpretive Structural Modelling (TISM). The structural model obtained by TISM is applied to understand the dependency quantitative factors. Based on TISM results, a classification of quantitative factors is determined using « Matrice d'Impacts Croisés, Multiplication Appliquée à un Classement » (MICMAC) analysis. This paper may be helpful to understand the previously mentioned characteristics of reconfigurable supply chain in order to facilitate the measuring and the assessment of reconfigurability.