Supply chain agility for firm's performance: a study of textile-apparel-retail supply chain network

Abstract

This article discusses the characteristics of textile and apparel industry supply chain and identifies the measures, which can be used to gauge their performance. This study classifies the firms of the textile-apparel-retail supply chain network based on their level of supply chain agility and tests the differences in firms’ performance across the clusters so obtained. This research employs survey method and data is collected from 157 firms of the Indian textile-apparel-retail supply chain network. Valid and reliable measures of supply chain agility and organisational performance are developed. Factor structure and initial validity is determined and K-means cluster analysis is applied for clustering firms based on their level of supply agility. Multiple regression and ANOVA is used for hypotheses testing. The uniqueness of this study is that data have been collected from multiple nodes across the supply chain network.