Abstract
Agility is one of the coming challenges to the supply chain management companies. This paper presents a model to evaluate agility for supply chain management companies and answers the question that how agile a supply chain management company is. It shows a complete set of items in evaluating agility in SCM companies.The model surveys agility in responsiveness with indexes such as strategic planning, sensitivity to change and virtual enterprise; flexibility with indexes such as market flexibility, logistics flexibility,operations system flexibility and supply flexibility;competency with indexes such as integrative mechanism, shared culture, joint decision making, trust and communication; and finally quickness with indexes such as speed of new product introduction,delivery time and speed in operation.The results of S.G.S Co. show that it is in the middle range of agility. It also identifies weak factors within the organization which by improving them, the company can improve its agility index. Evaluation is done in fuzzy logic.
Highlights
The concept of agility was first introduced in a report from the Iacocca Institute at Lehigh University in 1991
This paper answered the question that how agile an Supply Chain Management (SCM) company is
It showed a complete set of items which must be mentioned in evaluating agility in a SCM company
Summary
A supply chain is a system whose constituent parts include material suppliers, production facilities, distribution services and customers linked together via a feed-forward flow of materials and feedback flow of information Stevenes (1989). Christopher and Peck (2004) define supply chain agility as the ability to respond quickly to unpredictable changes in demand or supply. From their point of view, the key to an agile response is the presence of agile partners in upstream and downstream of the focal firm. This research takes advantage of the one from Swafford et al (2006) They define agility as “the supply chain’s capability to adapt or respond in a speedy manner to a changing marketplace environment”. The research question is highly important since it is argued that in today’s markets competition is no longer based on company versus company model, but instead is supply chain versus supply chain (O’Marah, 2001)
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