Understanding and Development of Supply Chain Agility and Flexibility: A Structured Literature Review

Abstract

This paper provides a review of the literature while contributing to academic understanding of the concepts of agility and flexibility within the supply chain. The research identified 83 peer‐reviewed articles through a structured review technique, which is based on a three‐stage refinement process. Data reduction procedures using codification, sentence strings and a review of keywords, title, abstract and conclusion were used in the search. The papers identified focused on organizational and supply chain agility and flexibility. The acknowledged gaps in understanding and development of agility and flexibility in supply chains were identified and categorized in terms of conceptual, contextual and methodological gaps. Subsequent to the gap analysis, this paper argues that effective relationship integration with key partners is a fundamental mechanism for mitigating the problem of control dissipation, which has hindered academic understanding with respect to development and application of agile and flexible capabilities in supply chains. The findings in this paper will help academics to gain a better understanding and to develop the concepts of supply chain agility and flexibility. In addition, the findings indicate that supply chain stakeholders need to address the issue of relationship integration when undertaking, or participating in agility and flexibility development programmes, so as to maximize supply chain performance. The paper concludes by highlighting implications for managers and researchers, and proposes a number of areas for future investigation.

Determinants of sourcing flexibility and its impact on performance

“…In their comprehensive literature review 1 , Seebacher and Winkler (2013) remark that research on supply chain flexibility deals with "the issue of rapidly reconfiguring and aligning the supply chain and its entities according to changing requirements in a cost efficient way" (p. 3416), and that this research "is also characterised by a vast variety of different supply chain flexibility dimensions and types" (p. 3417). Two typical characterizations for supply chain flexibility can be found in Swafford, Ghosh, and Murthy (2006) who considered the components procurement/sourcing 1 Other reviews of the supply chain flexibility literature can be found in Fayezi, Zutshi, and O'Loughlin (2016), More and Babu (2009), Singh and Acharya (2013), Stevenson and Spring (2007), and Tiwari, Tiwari, and Samuel (2015).…”

The Integration of Extended Supply Chain with Sales and Operation Planning: A Conceptual Framework

“…It is much easier for companies to attain competitive advantage and high customer satisfaction if they have flexibility in logistic functionality [119]. Flexibility also enables a high supply chain performance [120]. Interestingly, the implementation of IS in the supply chain offers more flexibility toward the customers [121].…”

The Mediating Role of Supply Chain Management Practices in the Relationship Between Manufacturing Flexibility and Manufacturing Performance

“…Flexibility is now emerging as one of the key competitive priorities in manufacturing environment that prioritized products variety, ability to varied production volumes, short product life cycle and time-based competition. Thus, flexibility is seen as an important attribute of the manufacturing system that is capable of fulfilling the challenges posed by uncertain business environment (Fayezi et al, 2017). A great deal of research in attempting to identify various types of flexibilities in manufacturing has been carried out over the past few decades.…”