New flexibility drivers for manufacturing, supply chain and service operations

Abstract

Increasing product proliferation, customisation, competition and customer expectations, as well as supply side disruptions, pose significant challenges to firm operations. Such challenges require improved efficiency and resilience in manufacturing, service and supply chain systems. New and innovative flexibility concepts and models offer a prospective route to such operational improvements. Several emerging issues in flexibility, such as risk and uncertainty management, environmental sustainability, optimal strategies under competition, optimal operations with strategic consumer behaviours are being examined in this regard. This overview provides a concise review of these critical research issues, and discusses related papers featured in this special issue. Four major flexibility drivers are classified: disruption risks, resilience and the ripple effect in the supply chain; digitalisation, smart operations and e-supply chains; sustainability and closedloop supply chains; and supplier integration and behavioural flexibility.Keywords: flexibility; flexible manufacturing; supply chain management; supply chain risk management; supply chain coordination; Industry 4.0; manufacturing systems; service supply chain; ripple effect Flexibility in manufacturing, service and supply chain systemsWith increasing product proliferation, reduced unit demand volumes and next-day delivery expectations, flexibility in operations, service and supply chains has become an important focal area for research and industry. This special issue of IJPR aims to present state-of-the-art research in the field of flexibility in manufacturing, supply chain and service operations.A brief background on flexibility is provided in this section. Flexibility refers to the ability of a system to change (adapt) in dynamic environments. Operational system flexibility has been studied extensively in the manufacturing, service and supply chain literature from various strategic, tactical and operative perspectives (Slack 1987;Bordoloi, Cooper, and Matsuo 1999;Koste and Malhotra 1999;D'Souza and Williams 2000;Das 2001;Van Mieghem 2003;Zhang, Vonderembse, and Lim 2003;Wu, Erkoc, and Karabuk 2005;Alp and Tan 2008;Chang 2012;Jain et al. 2013;Choi, Cheng, and Zhao 2016;Cobb 2016;Ivanov, Tsipoulanidis and Schönberger 2017).A substantive part of this research studies capacity flexibility, classifying investigations into two main areas, i.e. decisions on investment in dedicated versus flexible capacity (Li and Tirupati 1994;Bish, Muriel, and Biller 2005), and process flexibility (or capacity adaptability). Process flexibility (Jordan and Graves 1995;Chou et al. 2010) analyses the ability of a company to change manufacturing setups at flexible lines according to demand or supply changes. It relies, in part on the capability to produce multiple products on multiple production facilities or lines (Jordan and Graves 1995;Simchi-Levi and Wei 2015). In particular, the design of a flexible production network under stochastic demand has been studied by Jordan and Graves (199...

Blockchain technology and its relationships to sustainable supply chain management

“…In addition to the future research on the theoretical propositions, technical and engineering research related to various supply chain themes is also needed. For example, distributed supply chain coordination (Chan and Chan 2010;Ivanov et al 2016), material and information flow coordination (Ivanov, Sokolov, and Raguinia 2014), virtual enterprises (Sarkis, Talluri, and Gunasekaran 2007;Crispim and de Sousa 2010), agile supply chain management (Sarkis and Talluri 2001;Cabral, Grilo, and Cruz-Machado 2012), flexibility in supply chains (Ivanov, Das, and Choi 2018), performance measurement of supply chains (Arzu Akyuz and Erman Erkan 2010), supply chain resiliency, risk and ripple effect (Dolgui, Ivanov, and Sokolov 2018;Ivanov 2018), real-time control and service oriented supply chains (Xu 2011) are all potential technical topics that can relate to advancing blockchains and supply chain research.…”

Increasing flexibility and productivity in Industry 4.0 production networks with autonomous mobile robots and smart intralogistics

“…Over the past two decades, flexibility has been considered an important determinant in production system design (Das 2001;Dolgui and Proth 2010;Dubey and Ali 2014;Jain et al 2013;Dubey et al 2018;Ivanov et al 2018a) and particularly Industry 4.0 has also been iden-B Giuseppe Fragapane giuseppe.fragapane@ntnu.no Extended author information available on the last page of the article tified as a major determinant in improving production flexibility (Cavalcantea et al 2019;Dubey et al 2019;Frank et al 2019;Ivanov et al 2016Ivanov et al , 2019a. The aspiration of Industry 4.0 is to promote the virtualization, decentralization and network building to transform the traditional production environment (Brettel et al 2014).…”

Anarchic manufacturing

“…Modern manufacturers have to frequently adapt to dynamic and unpredictable environments, particularly for job shops and flow shops (Scholz-Reiter, Rekersbrink, and Görges 2010). To counter volatile environments, manufacturers employ flexible operations as a strategic and competitive priority (Narasimhan, Talluri, and Das 2004;Ivanov, Das, and Choi 2018), often using smart manufacturing technologies (Kusiak 2018).…”