Abstract
Worldwide business organizations realize that agility of sustainable supply-chain is a requisite need for survival in a dynamic, competitive, and unpredictable market. The contribution of this research is to explore and evaluate sustainable agility in supply chains for a dairy manufacturing organization located in Saudi Arabia. Other contributions of this research are to update the literature about the different factors contributing to achieve agile supply chain, propose conceptual framework and assessment approach incorporating the relationships between sustainable supply-chain capabilities, enablers, and attributes, and shortlisting the agility barriers and how they would facilitate manufacturing organizations’ performance. The paper presents supply chain agility evaluation approach, which covers identification of agile supply-chain capabilities and drivers. It also presents a conceptual model and a framework to define agility level and barriers within the supply-chain. In the paper, fuzzy logic approach is preferred, owing to its capability to incorporate and deal with problems involving impreciseness and vagueness phenomena. Threshold-value in this study for the case organization is set to 0.24829. The outcome of the adopted approach indicates that 21 attributes performed below the threshold value; these attributes are further categorized as agility barriers. These are the barriers within their supply chain that impact the agility-level. For the case organization, the foremost priority is to enhance maintainability and serviceability to make it flexible and inexpensive to establish an agile responsive supply chain. At the same time, it should have priority to focus on development and integration of their core competencies to deal with cross-functional and cross-enterprise issues in supply chain. For the case organization, the agility level was found “very agile,” although it is below the “extremely agile.” Thus, a study was developed to understand the behaviour of the supply chain agility and assess/evaluate it to support decision makers in order to develop a strategic solution for different organizational barriers.
Highlights
In the dynamic, competitive, and unpredictable market, customer demand can be satisfied through different strategies which are related to suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and customers, and get controlled by flows of material, finance, information, and technology [1,2]
Agility is capability to quickly-sense and timely-respond to market dynamics and sustainable customers, whereas sustainable agility is the supply chain agility when it is supported at every level of the organization interactions over processes and tools [3]
For the case study on hand, their supply chain has been subject to criticism due to their lack of desired focus on supply chain strategies in context to local and global market
Summary
Competitive, and unpredictable market, customer demand can be satisfied through different strategies which are related to suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and customers, and get controlled by flows of material, finance, information, and technology [1,2]. To explore competitive base and strategies, business organizations should practice moulding their supply-chain with a knowledge-rich environment and integration of resources. This helps with understanding the behaviour of supply-chain and developing assessment for supporting decision makers to develop alternative strategies for a specific organizational problem. Agility is capability to quickly-sense and timely-respond to market dynamics and sustainable customers, whereas sustainable agility is the supply chain agility when it is supported at every level of the organization interactions over processes and tools [3].
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