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This paper aims to analyze the mediating role of Supply Chain Flexibility on the interrelationships binding Lean Production implementation, Mass Personalization and business performance.

A random sample of 260 companies obtained from a population of 1,717 Spanish companies that occupy an intermediate position in the supply chain has been used to test the proposed hypothetical framework. Telephone surveys using a computerized system have been used to collect data, obtaining a response rate of 15.6 and a structural equation model has been designed to test the six proposed hypotheses.

Companies initially implement Lean Production to optimize Mass Personalization processes and improve business performance. However, in the presence of Supply Chain Flexibility, Lean Production implementation no longer has a direct impact on Mass Personalization and business performance, but it does have an indirect impact through the flexibility it achieves (shown as a total mediating path). Therefore, companies should implement Lean Production to achieve flexibility and thus optimize the Mass Personalization processes and obtain better performance.

Academics and business managers may have supporting evidence on the role played by the total mediating effect of Supply Chain Flexibility on the relationship between Lean Production, Mass Personalization and business performance. A better knowledge of these management resources and their relationship could affect the way researchers and practitioners approach them, becoming more aware of the important role of the supply chain in competitiveness.

This paper integrates research on demand- and supply-side risk management practices to better explain how to achieve competitive advantage in dynamic business conditions. The purpose of this study is to develop a model linking supply chain flexibility, agility, robustness and resilience and to investigate its relationships and impact on business performance.

The authors conduct a review of existing literature to derive their hypotheses and operationalize the respective constructs. The formulated research model is then validated applying partial least squares structural equation modeling on survey data from 89 multi-national companies based in Europe.

The authors find a significant positive relationship between supply chain flexibility and supply chain agility as well as supply chain robustness and supply chain resilience, respectively. Additionally, it is argued that supply chain flexibility, agility and resilience have significant positive impact on individual dimensions of business performance.

The relationships between supply chain flexibility, agility, robustness, resilience and business performance are investigated and empirically validated altogether in a single model for the first time, providing a clear separation of these terms and shedding further light on the management of supply chain risks.

Changes are inevitable in risky and uncertain business environments of today’s volatile supply chains. The concept of flexibility originates from this need to mitigate the ill-effects of risks and uncertainty in supply chains. In this paper, an attempt is made to present an exhaustive review on supply chain flexibility (SCF) and its implementation to gain strategic advantages.

A citation analysis method is employed in this paper to discuss, analyse and apprehend the conceptual, empirical, analytical and simulation studies done in this field. In this paper, about 110 papers on flexibility from many reputed journals are examined to study and assimilate various aspects of flexibility.

SCF embraces a unified process-based view including the core processes such as procurement, sourcing, distribution and logistics and mitigates uncertainty or risks involved. The review helps to assimilate the key knowledge about relevant practices in SCF and helps to draw implementing strategies while offering managerial insight on the subject.

Citation and co-citation analysis is done to review the SCF literature. Efforts are made to investigate relevant papers from various journals regarding its ability to mitigate risk or aid in making strategic decision. The study, however, is limited to certain industries in the papers as per chosen approach here. The strategies described in here may further be verified by the researchers and practitioners pertaining to their study or industries focused.

It provides managerial insight for practitioners on how to use flexibility within the firm and across supply chain while considering various trade-offs.

This paper is unique as a review paper, as it encompasses various kinds of studies done on SCF from conceptual models to mathematical models. Further, it briefs with the current practices in industries/SC towards being flexible. It talks of various trade-offs in pursuit of flexibility and concludes while suggesting numerous research gaps and opening new dimensions for SCF research. It offers many managerial and academic implications.

The purpose of this paper is to map the causal relations among various supply chain flexibility (SCF) dimensions having significant impact on the Indian personal hygiene industry.

The author(s) have gone through extensive literature review and extracted 22 SCF dimensions. After conducting field visits and expert interaction in the firm related to case industry, 11 major SCF dimensions that seem to have a significant amount of influence on supply chain performance of the firms were retained for further consideration. The author(s) have used decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) to establish initial causality and structural equation model (SEM) to investigate the contribution of different flexibility dimensions on overall SCF.

After DEMATEL analysis, three major SCF dimensions were considered for SEM modeling. The result shows that product flexibility and physical distribution flexibility have favorable influence on the SCF, while the demand management flexibility adversely impacts overall SCF.

The approach adopted in the study can help firms to determine and exercise the flexibility dimensions of a particular supply chain. The DEMATEL and SEM offer a facilitation to explain the causal relationship between the different dimensions to take long-term decisions and address the uncertainty in the demand and supply side.

This paper has made an attempt to evaluate the supply chain flexibilities, prioritize them and evaluate the relationship amongst these flexibilities and the degree to which they affect or are affected by one another in the Indian personal hygiene industry.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between strategy and flexibility in new product development, and the operational and financial performance in the supply chain context. The motives for conducting this research are to introduce the supply chain strategies and new product development flexibility (NPDF) as constructs that could have the potential to contribute to the success of supply chain performance. Based on the relational view of the firm, the authors propose that supply chain strategy is an antecedent of NPDF and can create value for the buying firm in terms of better financial and non-financial performance.

The structural equation modeling approach was used to evaluate the proposed model and analyze hypothesized relationships. The analysis, based on data collected from 175 small- and medium-sized (SME) Canadian manufacturing companies.

The analysis shows that there are direct positive effects from strategy on NPDF. The findings indicate also a direct positive association between NPDF and performance and showed that the total effect (direct and indirect) positively influenced performance.

The literature did not reveal any study which attempted to examine strategy, NPDF, and performance in the supply chain context of SMEs. The current study fills this important gap in the literature.

Supply chain coordination is concerned with managing dependencies between various supply chain members and the joint efforts of all supply chain members to achieve mutually defined goals. There are different coordination mechanisms reported in the literature that have been discussed in isolation like information sharing, information technology, long‐term partnerships, and joint decision making which help in coordinating supply chain members. Various coordination models have been proposed considering isolated activities of the supply chain. There is a need to consider a holistic perspective of coordination in the entire supply chain. This paper sets out to analyze a case study of XYZ, a leading automotive parts manufacturer in India, to throw light on the status of coordination in its supply chain.

A situation‐actor‐process (SAP)‐learning‐action‐performance (LAP) model has been applied to analyze the case study of XYZ. The situation represents the present scenario of the organization. Actors are the participants, influencing the situation to evolve different business processes. Based on SAP, various learning issues have been analyzed which lead to suitable action followed by impact of SAP on the performance of the supply chain of the organization.

Various issues that need attention are: the type of relationship with suppliers and buyers, coordination effort with supply chain members, various mechanisms like information sharing, information technology, information systems, joint decision making, and flexibility required to adopt the above‐mentioned issues of coordination.

The flexible model of SAP‐LAP is used to explain soft and hard issues of supply chain coordination in a managerial context with reference to a dynamic SAP‐LAP model as applied to the case of XYZ.

The flexible model of SAP‐LAP presents the situation of coordination to participants who may initiate the processes needed to be coordinated. It also helps in identifying flexibility gaps in adoption of coordination mechanisms. The synthesis of SAP leads to LAP, which bridges the gap of flexibility by suggesting improvement actions on the gaps of flexibility or the learning from the present situation, actors and processes.

This is a novel approach to analyze quantitative and qualitative issues of supply chain coordination in a single model comprising various perspectives on coordination, coordination mechanisms, and flexibility required to coordinate, and the impact of coordination on performance of the supply chain.

This paper aims to examine the factors influencing innovation performance and implementation in inter-organizational relationships.

A novel research model comprises five research hypotheses with four constructs, including information technology infrastructure flexibility, institutional orientation, dynamic capabilities and innovation performance. The hypotheses are tested on data collected from 260 of the top 1,000 Taiwanese manufacturing firms in 2011 listed by Business Weekly in Taiwan, using structural equation modeling.

The study provides insight into how supply chain members should reinforce their dynamic capabilities and relational and institutional view of relational governance so as to improve their value-based relationships and in turn enhance innovation performance.

The empirical study is conducted on supply chains, with data collected from Taiwan's manufacturing firms. With the research model developed, cross-industrial studies can be conducted to investigate whether differences exist in relation to the inter-relationship effects that affect inter-organizational innovation performance.

The study provides useful insights into how supply chain members should reinforce their value-based relationships by focusing on activities that would enhance information technology infrastructure flexibility and institutional orientation, and improve activities that would reinforce the activities of dynamic capabilities, in order to achieve the competitive advantage of inter-organizational innovation performance.

The novel research model developed may serve as a starting point for future theoretical and empirical research and measures for describing and modeling the role of value-based relationships from the relational and institutional view of relational governance and dynamic capabilities, which is not dealt with in previous studies.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct an exploratory study that will assist supply chain firms in the development of partner satisfaction, flexibility, and supply chain performance. The authors examine how the interaction of information exchange, partner interaction, knowledge sharing and flexibility as mediated through partner satisfaction effectuates firm performance. The goal of this research is to answer the supply chain managers’ need to better understand where to invest their time and effort to get improved firm performance.

The model was tested with panel data from 105 experienced, US-based supply chain managers. Structural equation modeling using partial least squares approach was utilized to conduct the analysis.

The results provide crucial evidence that simple information exchange among supply chain partners does not result in improvements in firm performance or partner satisfaction, but, when mediated through the flexibility construct, it does. Further, the use of integration tools has a moderating effect on the relationship between flexibility and firm performance. The results suggest that working closely with supply chain partners helps ensure improved relationship satisfaction, and can reduce issues that can impact firm performance.

The empirical research presented requires additional validation though larger sample data from supply chain managers.

This study stresses on the importance of managers using information exchange, partner interaction, and knowledge sharing as a means of improving their firm’s indirect influence on firm performance through flexibility and integration tools.

This is one of the few studies in the supply chain literature that integrates flexibility as a mediator variable. Additionally, this study introduces the new construct of integration tools to the supply chain literature.

Supply chain flexibility has been acknowledged as a necessity in the context of constantly changing operational and service requirements in the global marketplace. However, limited research has focused on analyzing and empirically testing the dynamics of achieving enhanced flexibility performance. Drawing upon the knowledge-based view of the firm, the purpose of this paper is to address this research gap by introducing supply chain learning (SCL) and integration as key factors in the process.

Survey data were collected in India. Structural equation modeling technique was used as the main analysis method to test the proposed conceptual model on SCL, integration, and flexibility performance.

Research findings indicate that the supply chain integration construct (in its internal and external dimensions) mediates the proposed SCL-flexibility performance relationship. The analysis also confirms the positive relationship between cross-functional integration and inter-firm integration.

Focusing on only one country may limit the generalizability of the findings. Also, cross-sectional data collection may not be the ideal approach for evaluating the impacts of SCL. Therefore, future research with longitudinal data and in different contexts is warranted to validate the research results of this study.

The proposed conceptual model adds to the limited existing knowledge body of SCL and links SCL, integration, and flexibility performance. It also provides a new venue for future research in this area.

The purpose of this research is to examine the relationships among strategy, flexibility, and performance in the supply chain context.

The research is based on a quantitative approach using a questionnaire survey and personal interviews from a total of 175 small and medium‐sized Canadian manufacturing companies. The identified constructs have been utilized to test a theoretical model using the path analysis technique.

First, the findings provide evidence of direct effects of strategy on flexibility and flexibility on performance. Second, innovative strategy firms must invest time and resources in developing new product and delivery flexibility; while customer‐oriented strategy firms are required to invest heavily in developing sourcing, product, and delivery flexibility and follower strategy firms need no investment in any specific type of flexibility. Third, results demonstrated that Canadian manufacturers must reconsider how they use information technology to enhance information systems flexibility and improve overall performance.

The measures of flexibility and strategy dimensions used to rate the supply chain organizations are a possible limitation of the research study.

Managers need to think seriously about which type of flexibility they implement and that they should not increase all dimensions of flexibility in their power; some dimensions of flexibility may not significantly contribute to the overall performance. Considering that small and medium‐sized enterprises have limited resources, it is important for managers to carefully assess their strategic needs before getting involved in any flexibility program; otherwise the result can be competitively negative.

No empirical study was found in the supply chain literature that specifically investigates the relationships among strategy, flexibility and performance in the supply chain context; the paper fills an important gap in the supply chain literature.