Flexible Supply Chain Analysis

Introduction
Firms are under great pressure to become more competitive. The main drivers behind this are globalization and the liberalisation of the marketplace. Firms that previously operated on a national or continental level now find themselves facing international competition. In addition, consumer demands are now changing more quickly. These changes in the competitive landscape have resulted in a greater focus on a firm’s supply chain. Some literature like (Ketchen & Hult, 2007), even go as far to state that supply chains compete against each other instead of firms against each other. They also add that instead of just focusing on speed or costs supply chains now also have to offer superior quality and flexibility. (Kopecka, et al., 2016)

(Lee, 2004) does not offer a direct way to make a supply chain more flexible but instead offers three distinct characteristics that flexible supply chains have. These three characteristics are Agility, Adaptability and Alignment. Agility is the ability of a supply chain to quickly respond to short term changes in demand or supply and handle external disruptions smoothly. Adaptability is defined as the ability to change the design of the supply chain to meet structural changes in the market, modify supply network strategies, products and technologies. And finally, alignment refers to creating incentives along the partners of the supply chain to increase overall performance. (Kopecka, et al., 2016) (Lee,

The final part that we will include in our general definition is manufacturing flexibility because the cases that we will look at later are largely about manufacturing.
Manufacturing flexibility consists of four aspects. The first aspect is Mix Flexibility, the ability to produce multiple different products at the same time in order to service different segments. The second aspect is Volume Flexibility, the ability to quickly change the production level and the product mix in order to react to volatile markets. The third aspect is New Product Flexibility, which is the ability to quickly add or substitute new products to the product mix. The fourth and final aspect is Delivery Time Flexibility, the ability to quickly reduce the order to delivery time of products.

Combining agility, adaptability and the aspects of manufacturing flexibility gives us the following definition: Flexibility in supply chains refers to the ability to respond both short term and structural changes in demand, supply or the market, handle other external disruptions smoothly and also includes mix, volume, new product and delivery time aspects of flexible manufacturing. (Kopecka, et al.,