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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.

As an effective mode to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) raise working capital, supply chain finance has recently gained extensive attention. The purpose of this paper is to explore the intrinsic mechanism of how both weak and strong ties in the supply chain network impact the supply chain financing performance (SCFP) of SMEs from the perspective of the supply chain network.

Based on the extended resource-based perspective, this paper proposes a theoretical model to explain the mode in which strong ties and weak ties of SMEs in the supply chain network influence SCFP through both physical distribution flexibility and demand management flexibility. Based on data from 182 manufacturing firms in China, this paper uses multiple regression analysis to test hypotheses.

The results of this paper indicate that weak ties improve SCFP more effectively than strong ties. Furthermore, both physical distribution flexibility and demand management flexibility exert different mediating roles either between strong ties and SCFP or between weak ties and SCFP. Moreover, the effect of physical distribution flexibility and demand management flexibility on SCFP of SMEs is not reinforced.

This paper highlights the importance to expand supply chain finance research from the perspective of the supply chain network. In particular, this paper explores the poorly understood mediating effect both physical distribution flexibility and demand management flexibility exert on the relationship between network ties and the SCFP of SMEs.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how decisions regarding organisational flexibility can be improved through targeted resource allocation, by focusing on the supply chain's level of uncertainty exposure. Specifically, the issue of where and in what ways flexibility has been incorporated across the organisation's supply chain is addressed.

A two-phase methodology design based on literature review and case study was used. Using 83 journal articles in the areas of uncertainty and flexibility an analytical process for assessing uncertainty-flexibility mismatches was developed. Furthermore, results from ten interviews with senior/middle managers within the Australian manufacturing sector were used to provide preliminary insights on the usefulness and importance of the analytical process and its relationship with organisational practice.

The paper emphasises the importance of having a systematic and encompassing view of uncertainty-flexibility mismatches across the supply chain, as well as the significance of socio-technical engagement. The paper both conceptually and empirically illustrates how, using a structured analytical process, flexibility requirements across the supply, process, control and demand segments of a supply chain might be assessed. A four-step analytical process was accordingly developed and, its application, usefulness and importance discussed using empirical data.

The analytical process presented in this paper can assist managers to obtain a comprehensive overview of supply chain flexibility when dealing with situations involving uncertainty. This can facilitate and improve their decision-making with respect to prioritising attention on identified flexibility gaps in order to ensure stability of their performance.

The paper presents a supply chain-wide discussion on the difficulties that uncertainty brings to organisations, and how organisational flexibility might serve to moderate those challenges for supply chain management. It discusses how to identify the flexibility gap and proposes an original analytical process for systematic assessment of uncertainty-flexibility mismatches.

Supply chain flexibility is crucial for firms to respond to uncertain circumstances caused by environmental factors, such as the diversity of customer demands, problems of product safety, and adjustments of industrial policies. To investigate the approach to enhance supply chain flexibility, the purpose of this paper is to propose that both internal and external information integration contribute to reactive and proactive supply chain flexibilities, which elicit high operational performance.

Using a sample of 84 food companies that have been listed three years in China and content analysis based on their annual reports, evidence was collected to test the hypotheses through hierarchical regressions.

The results reveal that external information integration results in both reactive and proactive flexibilities, which further improve operational performance. Internal information integration positively affects both reactive and proactive flexibilities, but its mediating role was not determined in the study.

The research provides insights into how supply chain flexibility mediates the effect of supply chain information integration on operational performance in the context of the Chinese food industry.

Many researchers have studied manufacturing flexibility, but supply chain flexibility is still an under‐investigated area. This paper aims to focus on supply flexibility, the aspects of flexibility related to the upstream supply chain. Its purpose is to investigate why and how firms increase supply flexibility.

An exploratory multiple case study was conducted. Seven Spanish manufacturers from various sectors (automotive, apparel, electronics and electrical equipment) were analysed.

The results show that firms need supply flexibility for a number of important reasons (manufacturing schedule fluctuations, JIT purchasing, manufacturer slack capacity, low level of parts commonality, demand volatility, demand seasonality and forecast accuracy), and that companies increase this type of flexibility by implementing two main strategies: “improved supplier responsiveness” and “flexible sourcing”. The results also suggest that the supply flexibility strategy selected depends on the type of uncertainty (mix, volume or delivery).

This paper has the limitations common to all case studies, such as the subjectivity of the analysis, and the questionable generality of the results. Moreover, there may be some sort of country bias because only Spanish firms have been analysed.

The study contributes to the existing literature by empirically investigating the main reasons for companies needing to increase supply flexibility and how they increase this flexibility, and suggesting some factors that could influence the selection of a particular supply flexibility strategy.

This paper presents an integrated conceptual model of supply chain flexibility. It examines flexibility classification schemes and the commonalities of flexibility typologies published in the literature to create a theoretical foundation for analyzing the components of supply chain flexibility. Even though there has been a tremendous amount of research on the topic of flexibility, most of it has been confined to intra‐firm flexibility concerns. As supply chain management goes beyond a firm’s boundaries, the flexibility strategies must also extend beyond the firm. This paper identifies the cross‐enterprise nature of supply chain flexibility and the need to improve flexibility measures across firms. Opportunities are identified for future cross‐functional research that builds on this theoretical foundation and leads to more effective formulation of supply chain strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate two potentially key drivers of a firm's supply chain agility, namely strategic sourcing and firm's strategic flexibility. Despite some theoretical and conceptual works suggesting that some elements of these two constructs may relate to agility, this has not yet been assessed together empirically. This study aims to address this gap in the literature.

This study involves an empirical investigation of a theory‐based model based on the competence‐capability framework, and a dynamic capabilities theoretical perspective, where the internal competencies of strategic sourcing and firm's strategic flexibility relate to the dynamic capability of the firm's supply chain agility. This investigation also includes the testing of a possible mediation effect of firm's strategic flexibility on the relationship between strategic sourcing and the firm's supply chain agility. The model is tested utilizing data from 144 US manufacturing firms via partial least square methodology.

The results of the empirical study indicated that both strategic sourcing and firm's strategic flexibility were significantly related to the firm's supply chain agility. In addition, while a full mediation effect was not found on the part of strategic flexibility, there was evidence for partial mediation.

Given that the data are from specific US industries, the generalizability of current findings to other industries or countries may require additional investigation.

Given the attention paid to agility in terms of its importance to responding to business uncertainty, and more recently, as an important capability in managing supply chain disruption risks, this paper investigates how strategic sourcing and flexibility can contribute to agility.

This paper seeks to evaluate the implications of operations flexibility in industrial supply chains and the effect it has on supporting initiatives designed for build‐to‐order (BTO) manufacturing.

An industrial case study is used to investigate operations flexibility and its impact on industrial supply chains. Tools used in the analysis include value stream mapping (VSM) and a scorecard for performance measurement. The scorecard tool comprises daily utilisation figures, product demand and responsiveness measures such as supply chain cycle times and pipeline inventory.

The results of the analysis confirm that supply chain VSM and scorecarding are effective tools that can be used to measure the performance of supply chains through the identification of inefficiencies associated with supply chain integration/design. The analysis shows the duration of value‐adding and non‐value adding activities in the entire chain. Also, the analysis has revealed the close relationship between operations flexibility and the supply chain flexibility dimensions of people and information systems.

The research presented analyses the operations and the supply chain of one industrial case study. The analysis does not cover the life cycle of the products mentioned in the study.

The study addresses the need, in the manufacturing industry, for tools that can be used in the analysis of manufacturing operations and supply chains, ultimately providing guidelines that can be used in the design of policies focused on performance improvement.

BTO initiatives are growing in importance in the manufacturing industry. The flexibility of operations and the supply chain are closely related to the concept of BTO in manufacturing.

It is crucial to recognize that supply chain flexibility is important to build sustainable competitive edge in coping with uncertainty. This study puts forth an empirically supported integrative framework to understand supply chain flexibility from market-oriented and network-oriented perspectives, interrelationships among its dimensions and the effect of supply chain complexity as a contingent factor.

The online survey data were collected from 201 manufacturing companies and checked for common method variance, validity and reliability. Structural equation modeling was then used to test the hypotheses.

The results of this study demonstrate that there are interrelationships among market-oriented and network-oriented supply chain flexibility dimensions. It is the flexibility embedded in the supply chain network configuration that plays critical roles in superior performance in flexibility capabilities to create customer values. The interrelated effect among flexibility dimensions is contingent on the magnitude of the supply chain complexity corresponding to the number of supply chain tiers.

This study takes a step to advance understanding of supply chain flexibility from an integrative point of view consisting of market-oriented and network-oriented perspectives. This study is expected to provide practitioners the foundation to implement supply chain flexibility considering the interrelationships among flexibility dimensions. Our results suggest that to carry out a supply chain flexibility strategy, the vertical complexity of the supply chain structure needs to be taken into consideration.

The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the underlying mechanism through which firms can achieve supply chain agility and augment business performance from the vendor’s perspective.

Drawing on dynamic capability view and contingency theory, the study conceptualizes a moderated mediation model to investigate the underlying influence of process integration (PI), supply flexibility and product-related complexity on supply chain agility and the subsequent effect of supply chain agility on firm’s business performance. Survey data from a sample of 148 firms, in the garment manufacturing industry, in Pakistan were analyzed using partial least square methods.

The results revealed that supply flexibility (i.e. volume and mix) mediates the effect of PI on supply chain agility. Supply chain agility, in turn, influences a firm’s business performance. Furthermore, the competence‒capability framework is not consistent across the varying degrees of product complexity such as product complexity hinders the effect of supply flexibility on supply chain agility, whereas it amplifies the impact of PI on supply chain agility. The conditional indirect effects suggest that the indirect effect of PI on supply chain agility through supply flexibility becomes stronger when product complexity is high.

The study is novel in the context of an emerging economy to educate fashion vendors to tune their competencies and capabilities to regain the market share in the global market place.