Flexibility has been considered as a major determinant of competitiveness in an increasingly intense competition in the marketplace. A large body of literature has been addressing various issues of flexibility in the last two decades. However, the discussions have mainly been from the viewpoint of a manufacturing company as a single entity in a supply chain. The flexibility related to machine, process, routing, part, worker and the like are all associated with a manufacturing or a production system. With the advent of the supply chain management concepts, business communities have been realising that being flexible in a production system only is insufficient. Thus, flexibility concepts should be broadened from the perspective of a production system into a supply chain system. However, the study addressing supply chain flexibility is still limited. This paper presents a framework for assessing flexibility of a supply chain. Four main parts of flexibility are identified including flexibility of the product delivery system, production system, product development, and supply system. In each of these parts, a number of pertinent elements are defined. A general guideline for conducting flexibility assessment is also presented. In an attempt to assess the model validity, a case study also forms a part of the paper.

Purpose -Increasingly, companies need to be vigilant with the risks that can harm the short-term operations as well as the long-term sustainability of their supply chain (SC). The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework to proactively manage SC risks. The framework will enable the company to select a set of risk agents to be treated and then to prioritize the proactive actions, in order to reduce the aggregate impacts of the risk events induced by those risk agents. Design/methodology/approach -A framework called house of risk (HOR) is developed, which combines the basic ideas of two well-known tools: the house of quality of the quality function deployment and the failure mode and effect analysis. The framework consists of two deployment stages. HOR1 is used to rank each risk agent based on their aggregate risk potentials. HOR2 is intended to prioritize the proactive actions that the company should pursue to maximize the cost-effectiveness of the effort in dealing with the selected risk agents in HOR1. For illustrative purposes, a case study is presented. Findings -The paper shows that the innovative model presented here is simple but useful to use. Research limitations/implications -In the proposed framework, the correlations between risk events are ignored, something that future studies should consider including. Practical implications -The framework is intended to be useful in practice. For the calculation processes, a simple spreadsheet application would be sufficient. However, most of the entries needed in the model are based on subjective judgment and hence cross-functional involvement is needed. Originality/value -The paper adds to the SC management literature, a novel practical approach of managing SC risks, in particular to select a set of proactive actions deemed cost-effective.

Purpose Theorising from the intersection of supply chain and information systems (IS) literature, this study aims to investigate supply chain integration (SCI) as a multidimensional construct in the context of cloud-based technology and explores the effect of cloud-enabled SCI on supply chain performance, which will eventually improve firm sustainability from a resource-based view (RBV). In addition, the moderating effect of top management is explored. Design/methodology/approach Using cross-sectional survey data collected from a sample of 105 Australian retail firms, this study used structural equation modelling to test the hypothesised relationship of cloud-enabled SCI with performance in a theoretical model. Findings Results show that cloud-based technology has positive effect on SCI, and the cloud-enabled SCI is positively related to supply chain performance which eventually influenced firm sustainability. Further, top management intervention moderates the relationship between supplier and internal integration with supply chain performance. But it is found to have no moderating effect on the relationship between customer integration and supply chain performance. Practical implications Recognising the potential benefits of emerging cloud-based technologies reported in this study, retail managers need to understand that higher order SCI requires the support of cloud-based technology to improve supply chain performance and firm sustainability. Originality/value This research extends prior research of information and communication technologies-enabled SCI and its effect on supply chain performance which overly remains inconsistent. In addition, IS literature abounds with discussion on cloud computing technology per se, and its adoption in supply chain is overly rhetoric. This study fills this gap by conceptualising the multiple dimensions of SCI enabled by cloud-based technology and the way it affects supply chain and firm sustainable performance. Investigating SCI in context of cloud-based technology is a unique contribution in this study. The moderating effect of top management in this decision also adds to the current body of literature.

Remanufacturing is one of the recovery processes that transforms a used product into aâ€oelike-new†product, and usually comes with similar warranty to the new product. Many manufacturers have concerns that remanufacturing might cannibalize the sales of the new product. Recent development shows an increasing trend in selling products through non-traditional channels such as manufacturer’s direct channel or echannel. We develop a pricing decision model for short life-cycle product in a closed-loop supply chain that consists of manufacturer, retailer, and collector. New product is sold via traditional retail store and remanufactured product is sold via manufacturer’s direct channel. We introduce two scaling factors; the first represents customer’s acceptance towards buying remanufactured product (reman-acceptance), and the second represents customer’s preference to buy remanufactured product via direct channel (direct-channel-preference). The results show that implementing separate channel can improve the total supply chain’s profit compared to the single-channel approach. We also find that both scaling factors influence pricing decisions and the profits of the supply chain members.

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