New Approaches for Modeling and Evaluating Agility in Integrated Supply Chains
In the exisiting hotly competitive environment, companies/enterprises/organizations are interesting by the following question: How to provide the desired products and/or services to customers faster, cheaper, and better than the competitors?. Managers have come to realize that they cannot do it alone; rather, they must work on a cooperative basis with the best organizations in their supply chains in order to succeed. Moreover, the emerging global economy and the advent of IC technologies have significantly modified the business organisation of enterprises and the way of doing business. New forms of organisations such as extended enterprises, virtual enterprises, long supply chains etc. appeared and are quickly adopted by most leading enterprises. It is more and more noticed that "Competition in the future will not be between individual organizations but between competing supply chains" (Christopher, 2004). More and more business opportunities are captured by groups of enterprises in the same supply chains. The main reason for this change is the global competition that force enterprises to focus on their core competences (i.e. to be what you do the best and let others do the rest). According to the visionary report of Manufacturing Challenges 2020 conducted in USA, this trend will continue and one of the six grand challenges of this visionary report is to ability to reconfigure manufacturing enterprises rapidly in response to changing needs and opportunities. While alliances like supply chains represent tremendous business opportunities, they also make related enterprises face greater uncertainties and risks. First supply chains are subject to market volatility and will have to be modified or dissolved once the business opportunities evolve or disappear. Changes or major perturbations at one enterprise will propagate through the supply chains to other enterprises and hence adversely influence the overall performance of the supply chains/networks. These issues are particularly important for SMEs. SMEs have to be part of some supply chains for business opportunities but they are not strong enough to face high uncertainties and risks, which are very common in today’s dynamic and volatile markets. The capabilities to evaluate agility, benefits, performances, risks, etc. of supply chains are crucial for the long term efficiency and thus need serious research attentions. Existing in both service and manufacturing activity sectors, generally speaking, a supply chain includes the transition and transportation of material from raw form through several O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w .in te ch w eb .o rg