The effect of additive manufacturing adoption on supply chain flexibility and performance: an empirical analysis from the automotive industry

Purpose – Changes are inevitable in risky and uncertain business environments of today’s volatile supply chains. The concept of flexibility originates from this need to mitigate the ill-effects of risks and uncertainty in supply chains. In this paper, an attempt is made to present an exhaustive review on supply chain flexibility (SCF) and its implementation to gain strategic advantages. Design/methodology/approach – A citation analysis method is employed in this paper to discuss, analyse and apprehend the conceptual, empirical, analytical and simulation studies done in this field. In this paper, about 110 papers on flexibility from many reputed journals are examined to study and assimilate various aspects of flexibility. Findings – SCF embraces a unified process-based view including the core processes such as procurement, sourcing, distribution and logistics and mitigates uncertainty or risks involved. The review helps to assimilate the key knowledge about relevant practices in SCF and helps to draw imple...

Supply chain flexibility: a comprehensive review

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate synergy/trade-off relationship between lean and operational resilience paradigms upon disruption. Lean and resilience are operationalised with practice bundles and core functions, respectively. Design/methodology/approach – The study uses the Bayesian inference approach to analyse systematically encoded data from firms that faced disruptions in their supply chain. The data were collected from publicly available sources, and encoded using predefined constructs prior to analysis. Findings – Findings show that the synergetic relations between operational resilience and lean in mitigating performance losses outweigh the trade-off. Just-in-time/flow and total productive maintenance lean practices appear to be major sources for the trade-off; there is limited-synergy leveraged on the anticipative (sense) capability of operational resilience. Research limitations/implications – The dependence on secondary data and small sample size are possible limitations. F...

Operational resilience and lean: in search of synergies and trade-offs

Manufacturing and supply chain flexibility has been discussed extensively in the scientific literature. Given the different definitions, types and dimensions of flexibility, the purpose of this paper is to explore the origins and structure of the scientific research on manufacturing and supply chain flexibility. We identified a sample of 153 internationally published papers and conducted a citation analysis to examine the connections between the many scientific papers and to explore the most influential works and their impact on flexibility research. Our analysis revealed that research on flexibility received the most scientific attention between 1996 and 2005. However, the majority of the currently valid types and dimensions of flexibility have been defined in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The current paper provides the leading academic journals and papers in the field of flexibility research. Additionally, the results of our citation analysis indicate that flexibility research is significantly inf...

A Citation Analysis of the Research on Manufacturing and Supply Chain Flexibility

The conceptualization of flexibility in organizations historically emerged from three views which relate to economic, to organizational and to manufacturing perspectives Despite the growing number of publications about supply chain flexibility in the area of supply chain management, there is a lack of consensus on how to define and to conceptualize supply chain flexibility from a management point of view The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive overview of the literature on the supply chain flexibility perspective and contributes to our understanding of the current state of research and its future development,The research methodology used is the systematic literature review In total 92 articles were selected from databases of well-known journal publishers in the field of economics, business studies and management sciences as well as grey literature to cover the topic of supply chain flexibility,A limited number of studies in the field of supply chain flexibility apply theories and define the term supply chain flexibility Instead they focus on a particular part or dimension of the supply chain Based on the analysis, a distinction is made between flexibility in the supply chain and supply chain flexibility Based on the function and characteristics of the supply chain, the authors selected 30 flexibility dimensions that cover supply chain flexibility by concentrating on the different business areas involved,The results support researchers and practitioners by identifying relevant trends and gaps in the field of supply chain flexibility,The authors review the dimensions and aspects of supply chain flexibility that are currently taken into account in the literature In this way, the authors provide an overarching perspective on the flexibility literature relating to supply chains

Supply chain flexibility A systematic literature review and identification of directions for future research

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate supply chain management practices related to flexibility, value chain and capabilities. It describes an exploratory study to examine the interrelated factors to propose a research framework.Design/methodology/approach – A comparative case study was conducted on several manufacturing organizations in the electrical and electronic industry, investigating the business drivers and response effect of a flexible value chain.Findings – In general, all the organizations enhanced their manufacturing flexibility components with supply and logistic networks in order to be responsive to customers and gain tangible benefits. The core flexibility of the value chain can be defined from operational, supply and logistics perspectives where different levels of integration and implementation strategies offer different levels of flexibility response to volume and product mix.Research limitations/implications – Research through case survey requires further empirical invest...

Quah Hock Soon

Papers

Supply chain management from the perspective of value chain flexibility: an exploratory study