Purpose – 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. Design/methodology/approach – 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. Findings – 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. Research limitations/implications – 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. Practical implications – It provides managerial insight for practitioners on how to use flexibility within the firm and across supply chain while considering various trade-offs. Originality/value – 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.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report a case study carried out to assess the agility and identify obstacles to agility in a supply chain. A human perception-based framework is used for the calculation of agility. The case study was carried out in a North India-based manufacturing organization. Design/methodology/approach In this study, the concept of a multi-grade fuzzy logic approach is used. Using this concept, the overall agility index has been determined. The fuzzy logic approach has been used to overcome the disadvantages such as impreciseness and vagueness using a scoring method. Findings From the analysis, it is observed that the organization on which the study was performed is “very agile.” After evaluating the agility level, the fuzzy performance importance index is calculated, which helps to identify the barriers of agility in the supply chain. These barriers help decision makers to implement appropriate improvement measures for improving agility level. Overall, 11 barriers were identified in the study. Research limitations/implications Managers of the contemporary manufacturing organization have to measure the agility level of the organization and identify barriers to agility in order to survive in a competitive environment. The obstacles identified in this study are used to improve the performance of the organization. The enterprise should improve on the weak areas in order to achieve the highest agility level. Originality/value The agile supply chain (ASC) enablers proposed by previous researchers are not sufficient for the evaluation of agility of a supply chain. There are a few more ASC enablers such as customer satisfaction, flexibility and adaptability that also play a vital role in making a supply chain agile. Adding these three ASC enablers, a total of seven ASC enablers along with their attributes are being considered for the development of a conceptual model.

The paper throws light on policy options for managing healthcare service-oriented supply chain dynamics.

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