Strategic approach to manage supply chain flexibility: A proposal

Abstract

Today's Supply Chains (SCs) are operating in complex and competitive business environment. To adapt, reduce or eliminate stimuli (uncertainty, disturbances or changes), making the SC more flexible is emerging as a new strategic tool. In reality, SCs are managed by various performance measures and flexibility is one of them, which is being more focused by researchers and industry practitioners. However, Supply Chain Flexibility (SCF) has continued to be a major challenge to comprehend and put it into real practice. An attempt has been made to develop a flexibility scorecard focusing on the flexibility metric in a balanced way. The paper addresses the important issues of how to provide flexibility in SCs and develops a specific proposal based on a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) approach. Copyright � 2012 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.