Tag Archives: supply chain agility

The Definition of Agility

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Although getting close to 20 years old now, The Agile Virtual Enterprise: Cases, Metrics, Tools, written in 1992  by H T (Ted) Goranson, is a book that still holds timeless ideas and visions that are still applicable.  While the at that time emerging vision of  the virtual enterprise is at the forefront of the book, it is also the only reference I have found that properly differentiates between agility and flexibility and what being agile actually entails. This blog has previously reported profusely on flexibility, let alone resilience and robustness, but has severely neglected agility. With this post, I intend to take a closer look at what it means to be agile.

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Humanitarian and military supply chains side-by side

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

The recent earthquakes in Samoa in the Pacific and in Padang in Indonesia are a poignant reminder for three chapters in my most recent book review, Dynamic Supply Chain Alignment by John Gattorna. In this book, the three chapters by Kim Winter and Michael Whiting and Kate Hughes point at why both military and humanitarian supply chains are needed for the overall best effective rescue effort. Only by combining the two, the strengths of both types of logistics can be exploited, where the extreme agility of rescue organizations can be matched with the extreme efficiency of the military.

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Supply chain agility – Risk mitigation and response

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

How does company culture shape a firm’s risk mitigation and response, and thus, how does company culture shape a firm’s supply chain agility? That is the research question asked by Michael J Braunscheidel and Nallan C Suresh in their 2009 article The organizational antecedents of a firm’s supply chain agility for risk mitigation and response. The article was suggested to me by one of my readers as his ‘favorite’, and after reading it I do understand why, because it links up with and extends many previous works on supply chain flexibility and supply chain agility.

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Lean + Agile = LeAgile: a happy marriage?

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Opposites attract and in the supply chain world, “lean” and “agile” appear to be opposites. Both management strategies have their advantages and disadvantages, and the question is, is it possible for them to exist side by side, or even fuse?  In their 2006 article A taxonomy for selecting global supply chain strategies, Christopher, Peck and Towill describe a fusion of Lean and Agile, termed LeAgile.

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Robustness, resilience, flexibility and agility

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Revised on: 2015-10-04

Several “buzzwords” have been linked to supply chain risk  management (SCRM) in various ways: robustness, flexibility, agility and resilience.  These concepts are often confused, and thus, warrant further explanation. They are distinctively different, and which strategy that works best would depend not only on the supply chain in question as a whole, but also which part of the supply chain that may be vulnerable. That is why it is useful to look at what sets one apart from the other.

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Agile Business Continuity

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Revised on: 2015-09-10

The other day I came across a new term: Agile Business Continuity, on the blog of Paul James, agilecontinuity.org. The coupling of the term agile with business continuity aroused my curiosity and I decided to dig deeper into what this blog was really about. I discovered that was a blog that is well worth reading and I think that the word agile really captures the essence of what business continuity management (BCM) is about in the first place and I will explain why I think so.

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