سوابق چالاکی زنجیره تامین یک شرکت: توسعه ابعاد کوچک و آزمون مدل

In a constantly changing global competitive environment, an organization's supply chain agility directly impacts its ability to produce, and deliver innovative products to their customers in a timely and cost effective manner. While the beneficial impact of supply chain agility is generally acknowledged, very little research exists to date addressing how an organization can achieve supply chain agility. This study first presents a framework of an organization's supply chain process flexibilities as an important antecedent of its supply chain agility, and then establishes the key factors that determine the flexibility attributes of the three critical processes of the supply chain—procurement/sourcing, manufacturing, and distribution/logistics. Using empirical data, we develop flexibility and agility scales related to our supply chain agility model, and then test the model. Findings reveal that supply chain agility of a firm is directly and positively impacted by the degree of flexibility present in the manufacturing and procurement/sourcing processes of the supply chain; while it is indirectly impacted by the level of flexibility within its distribution/logistics process. The results also support our view that a firm's supply chain agility is impacted by the synergy among the three process flexibilities in its internal supply chain.

Organizations typically compete along several competitive dimensions, such as cost, quality, delivery, flexibility, etc. (Wheelwright, 1984). However, today's hyper-competitive environment is characterized by constant change and market unpredictability (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1998). Complex technological advances, shortened product life cycles, diverse customer requirements, and increased demand for product variety in fragmented global markets have drastically shortened market visibility and increased uncertainty. Given these pervasive changes, successful organizations have to remain competitive while adapting to changing marketplace conditions (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1998). Since, “agility is all about customer responsiveness and mastering market turbulence” (van Hoek et al., 2001), agility is regarded as a necessary ingredient for improving competitiveness (Yusef et al., 1999).

The practitioner literature is replete with articles that encourage firms to behave as integrated supply chains. Normative models have shown the benefits of coordination, information sharing, economic cooperation, and joint optimization within a supply chain. However, in practice, banding together and competing as a supply chain is easier said than done. Moreover, the understanding between firms in a supply chain is more likely to go by the wayside during economic downturns. Using a resource based perspective, this study provides empirical validation of the benefits of flexibility in supply chain processes on overall supply chain agility. In this effort to understand drivers of supply chain agility, we experienced certain limitations that are commonly faced in survey-based research. The integrative nature of this research compounded the daunting task of obtaining an adequate sample size. Our need to measure the three flexibilities in conjunction with supply chain agility necessitated a longer survey than otherwise. In addition, identifying appropriate respondents for studying the supply chain process in a firm was challenging. These challenges lead us to make some difficult methodological trade-offs that are commonly faced. First, we used the same sample data to purify and validate our measures, and also test our hypotheses. The difficulty of obtaining a large enough sample has lead several researchers to make this compromise (e.g., Krause, 1999, Narasimhan and Das, 1999 and Papke-Shields et al., 2002). Second, to increase our sample size, we chose to focus our efforts on seeking as many respondents as possible, thus giving up the opportunity to explicitly establish inter-rater reliability. However, given the nature of our respondents we believe that this may not be an issue since our respondents have been primarily at the level of senior management who are expected to have a reliable SBU level perspective of the issues in our study.