City, University of London Institutional Repository
Citation: Pérez-Pérez, M., Kocabasoglu-Hillmer, C. ORCID: 0000-0001-6180-5636,
Serrano-Bedia, A. M. and López-Fernández, M. C. (2019). Manufacturing and Supply Chain
Flexibility: Building an Integrative Conceptual Model Through Systematic Literature Review
and Bibliometric Analysis. Global Journal of Flexible Systems Management, doi:
10.1007/s40171-019-00221-w
This is the accepted version of the paper.
This version of the publication may differ from the final published
version.
Permanent repository link: https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/23288/
Link to published version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40171-019-00221-w
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Manufacturing and Supply Chain Flexibility: Building an Integrative Conceptual Model
through Systematic Literature Review and Bibliometric Analysis
INTRODUCTION
Flexibility has long been a fundamental concept in operations management. The increasing demand for
customized products; and the volatility in business environments due to social, political, economic and
natural factors has kept flexibility on the agenda of both managers and academics, as it is an effective
coping mechanism with such forces (Merschman and Thoneman 2011; Seebacher and Winkler 2013; Blomé
et al. 2014; Xiao 2015; Ali and Murshid 2016; Teich and Claus 2017; Kaur et al. 2017). It has been
discussed as part of operations strategy (Dey et al. 2019), as a cross-functionally and an inter-
organizationally derived competence as well as a multi-dimensional, hierarchical system (Yu et al. 2015).
The earliest research on flexibility -commonly called manufacturing flexibility (MF) - considered it as
part of operations strategy, examining its role among other competitive priorities, including cost, quality and
delivery (Hayes and Wheelwright 1984). Particularly, manufacturing flexibility has been defined as the
capability to react effectively (Mishra et al. 2014; Solke and Singh 2018) to competitive threats (Oberoi et
al. 2007) adopting an internal and firm specific view. MF research has a history of at least three decades
(Koste et al. 2004) and its maturity is evident from the large body of research on this topic encompassing
multiple conceptualizations and frameworks (Beach et al. 2000; Jain et al. 2013, Mishra et al. 2014; Yu et
al.2015; Pérez-Pérez et al. 2016; Kumar and Mishra 2017 or Pérez-Pérez et al. 2018,). In time, the focus of
research shifted from this internal and firm-specific view, to the more contemporary concept of an external,
supply chain driven flexibility (Wadhwa et al. 2008; Bernardes and Hanna 2009; Stevenson and Spring
2009; Malhotra and Mackelprang 2012; Kumar et al. 2013; Thomé et al. 2014; Xiao 2015; Esmaeilikia et al.
2016; Shibin et al. 2016; Chatzikontidou et al. 2017; Kumar and Mishra 2017; Maestrini et al. 2017; Song et
al. 2018). Supply chain flexibility (SCF) is defined as “the ability to rapidly reconfigure key supply chain
(SC) resources in an attempt to maintain competitiveness” (Rojo et al. 2018, 637). It follows a logical
extension of MF (Lummus et al. 2003; Singh and Acharya, 2013; 2014; Tiwari et al. 2015) complementing
components of flexibility inherent at the firm level together with those at the inter-firm level (Stevenson and
Spring 2007) derived from inter-organizational core processes in procurement/sourcing and
distribution/logistics (Duclos et al. 2003; Singh and Sharma 2014; Esmaeilikia et al. 2016). Thus, SCF is a
much broader concept, considering flexibility from the perspective of the entire value chain (Merchsmann
and Thoneman 2011; Singh and Sharma 2014) that has emerged as a potential weapon to deal with current
competitive uncertainties and associated risks (Chirra and Kumar 2018).
The concepts of MF and SCF are strongly interlinked -the conceptual development of SCF exploits the
knowledge gained in manufacturing flexibility research- but still distinct (Merchsmann and Thoneman
2011; Kumar and Mishra 2017). As a consequence, “there is growing interest in the intersection of these
two related, strategic concepts” (Li et al. 2018, 1), which collectively emerge “as the key objective for
manufacturers and industrial supply chains” (Seebacher and Winkler 2013, 3415). The discussion of
manufacturing and supply chain flexibility (MSCF) can prove useful for at least three reasons. One, there is
value in taking an integrated perspective of the current state of these themes to understand its evolution and
future direction. Two, it helps understand what kind of investments elevate flexibility by strengthening both
MF and SCF simultaneously (Rao and Wadhwa 2002; Kumar and Deshmukh 2006; Kumar and Mishra
2017). Three, this review helps identify the antecedents and consequences of MSCF, the latter of which
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shows its relation to the wider SC field and link to other complex SC concepts such as SC agility (Fayezi et
al. 2017).
For these reasons, the main purpose of the paper is to provide a general overview of the status, trends and
potential future research areas of MSCF field applying systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis
that identifies thematic areas of MSCF trough co-words. Co-words is a systematic and objective technique
that focuses on the knowledge structure of the area studied. Thus, identifying the main topics of a research
domain, assessing their level of development relative to each other, pinpointing the emerging ones and
reflect on how these various themes can inform each other (Verbeek et al. 2002; Cobo et al. 2011). This
study extends previous research MSCF, such as Seebacher and Winkler (2013) and Kumar and Mishra
(2017) through a systematic literature review of the most up-to-date research. Consequently, this paper
contributes to previous literature in four ways. First, the literature review covers until July 2018 and uses a
large number of social sciences databases that helps to avoid potential bias towards a subset of journals and
the likelihood of omitting significant work in this field. Second, we provide a systematic literature review,
which starts when the scientific attention on flexibility began to grow in 1996 (Seebacher and Winkler
2013) and captures the fast-growing number of publications during the last two decades (Kumar and Mishra
2017). Third, it complements studies using co-citation analysis (Seebacher and Winkler 2013; Tiwari et al.
2015), where can one established the intellectual base of a research field rather than the content picture of
the research topics (Cobo et al. 2011). In co-citation analysis, for many articles, it also takes time to start
getting cited heavily and thus get picked up by the analysis (Feng et al. 2017). Four, based on a critical
reflection on the different thematic clusters identified by co-words, this study advances on the development
of an integrative conceptual model by identifying research opportunities to make future research
investments more productive.
The co-words analysis resulted in the identification of five thematic clusters: the value-chain, capability and
volatility clusters showed research topics that were taking a central role in the discussion on MSCF but were
not mature yet. The SC purchasing practices and SC planning clusters involved work that were more
focused and could be considered more mature. These clusters were then integrated in a framework that built
on the competence-capability perspective and identified the major structural and infrastructural elements of
MSCF as well as it antecedents and consequences.
The next section explains the methodology used in our literature review. Section 3 critically analyses the
results and section 4 discusses opportunities for future research through an integrative framework.
METHODOLOGY
The analysis started with literature search. Literature reviews are used to evaluate past body of literature
through a systematic design that provides a general overview of the status, trends and potential future
research areas of a research field. It is an integral part of the research process and makes a valuable
contribution to almost every step of the research design. That is because literature reviews contribute to
establish the theoretical roots of a research study, clarify research ideas and develop their research
methodology. Also, literature review “serves to enhance and consolidate knowledge base and helps
researchers to integrate their findings with the existing body of knowledge” (Kumar 2019, p. 46), thus
contributing to the contextualization of research findings. In summary, literature review gives an insight
about what other researchers have done on a subject matter and what is yet to be done.
Systematic reviews include an iterative cycle of determining primary and secondary search keywords for
retrieving a sample of relevant literature followed-up with a synthesis of the research to date as well as
reflection on future opportunities. To this end, we use a three-step methodology (Durach et al. 2017;
Maestrini et al. 2017) that is presented below:
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Step 1: Collection of past literature and evaluation for appropriateness
A systematic keyword-based search covering six social sciences databases (Gligor and Holcomb 2012;
Tiwari et al. 2015; Simangunsong et al. 2016; Moreira and Tjahjono 2016; Pérez-Pérez et al. 2018; Merigó
et al. 2019) namely, Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), SCOPUS, JSTOR, ABI, Business Source
Complete and Science Direct, was performed in July 2018.
To ensure that we capture the overlap between MF and SCF, we included “suppl* chain* flexib*”, and
“manufact* flexib*” and the co-occurring terms “flexib* suppl* chain*”, "operat* flexib*” and “production
flexib*” as primary terms of the search (Seebacher and Winkler 2013; Serrano-Bedia et al. 2013; Tiwari et
al. 2015; Yu et al. 2015; Esmaeilikia et al. 2016; Singh et al. 2017). Additionally, the broader term “supply
chain*” was included as a secondary keyword to guarantee the search being sufficiently inclusive to capture
most relevant articles within the scope of our research objective. Thus, nine different Boolean two-by-two
combinations of these primary and secondary keywords were used (see Figure 1), considering as search
criteria title, abstract and keywords, in line with previous research (Fahimnia et al. 2015; Yu et al. 2015;
Esmaelikia et al. 2016; Grover and Kar 2017; Brozovic 2018; Abdelilah et al. 2018). Specifically, to capture
the intersection of the MF and SCF domains, the connector AND was selected for these two-by-two
combinations. Truncation symbol “*” was used to search all the ending variants of the selected keywords
(Harkonen et al. 2015). This initial search attempts resulted in a total of 575 articles that was gradually cut
down for appropriateness (see Figure 1).
From 575 papers, those appearing in more than one database (192) were deleted, leaving 383 unique
documents. Subsequently, two complementary searches were performed. Firstly, all references of the
sampled papers (backward snowball search) and all works that cited papers contained in the sample
(forward snowball search) were checked as well through the use of Google Scholar as a secondary platform
for completeness (Moussaoui et al. 2016). Secondly, those journals in our sample containing “Flexible” or
“Flexibility” in the title and currently indexed in JCR (Journal Citation Reports) or SJR (Scimago Journal &
Country Rank) were re-examined by extending the search of selected keyword combinations from title,
abstract and keywords to “all fields”. 19 and 50 additional papers were identified, respectively, thus
increasing the sample to 452.
Then, to guarantee reliability, the sample was screened for content refinement. Although in most cases the
lack of fit with article´s scope could be identified from the title, abstract and keywords, sometimes it was
necessary to read the article to ascertain its suitability. For this reason, and to gain sample robustness, all the
authors of this paper examined those articles for which their research domain was unclear, until reach an
agreement. Furthermore, papers containing keyword combinations only in the references list were removed
from the sample (Fahimnia et al. 2015; Tiwari et al. 2015; Musa and Dabbo 2016), leading to a final sample
of 222 papers.
FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE
Step 2: Thematic identification through bibliometric analysis: co-words technique
The co-words technique uses the keywords of a sample of studies to identify the major themes in the domain
of interest, which are then analysed and interpreted (López‐Fernández et al. 2016). The technique is based