The role of human factors in flexibility management: A survey

Abstract

Flexibility can be defined as the ability to respond effectively to the ever-changing and increasing needs of the customer. For this demand to be satisfied, flexibility should be built into the total chain of acquisition, processing, and distribution stages. As a result, there is an increasing interest in flexibility and flexibility enabling mechanisms/parameters to achieve the best strategy for obtaining the right and desired output. Although quite a number of flexibility definitions and mechanisms can be found in the literature, flexibility remains poorly understood and utilized in practice. That is due to the lack of standardization in the terminology about the flexibility definitions and mechanisms.This article presents the finding of an extensive literature survey to determine the Intra flexibility mechanisms/parameters. These mechanisms/parameters are then classified, according to their contribution to the supply chain stages and their interaction with Inter Flexibility mechanisms (e.g., Organizational structure flexibility, Technology flexibility, Information system flexibility, and Human resource flexibility). In addition, the crucial role of human factors and its relationship with flexibility mechanisms are investigated, and related flexibility mechanisms are identified.

The Influence of Tactical Flexibilities on the Competitive Advantage of a Firm: An Empirical Study on Jordanian Industrial Companies

“…However, achieving competitive advantage urge manufacturing companies to implement varying strategies for creating volume flexible responses; these include using overtime and temporary workers, cross training workers, developing complementary product portfolios, creating and maintaining slack resources, creating a network of facilities, improving forecasting and planning systems with information technology as well as leveraging the firm's ability to negotiate on volume with suppliers and customers (Jack and Raturi, 2002, p. 520). Similarly, Kara et al (2002) support the idea that volume flexibility has positive impacts on organizational performance and competitive advantage in which they state that "volume flexibility permits the factory to adjust production upward or downward within wide limits", and this directly impacts customers' perceptions by preventing out-of-stock conditions for products that are suddenly in high demand. Thatte (2007) in line with Upton, 1997 andMartin andGrbac, 2003) argue that the improvement of flexibility and speed of response has become increasingly important as a method to achieve competitive advantage.…”

The Link between Modification Flexibility and Organizational Objectives: An Empirical Study on Jordanian Manufacturing Companies

“…However, the results of hypothesis H1 and H2 are consistent with the literature on operations strategy and manufacturing flexibility. Modification flexibility according to Kara et al, [20] is the ability of a process to make functional changes in the product. It is a result of uncertainty as to which particular attributes customers may want.…”

“…Assuring the validity and reliability measures requires supported literature to validate the measurement scales used for operationalsing the research constructs. For measuring modification flexibility, the measurement scales and indexes were adapted from the previous study of: [15,20,21,31,34] Sethi and Sethi, 1990, Gupta and Somers, 1996, Kara et al, 2002, Koste et al, 2004, Salvador, et al, 2007. Organizational objectives constructs were measured using measurement scales used by Lim [22] , Bennett [1] .…”

“…The benefits of flexibility: Reviewing the literature on flexibility [14,20,21,23,29,34,39,40] shows that flexibility offers the following benefits to organizations:…”

Towards Understanding How to Build Strategic Flexibility of an IT Organization

“…• Up-to-dateness and effectiveness of a change and satisfaction with the results of the change [18][19][20], • Difficulty, cost, time, effort, and risk of implementing a change [16,17,[21][22][23]], • Extent of change and stability [24], and • Universality of the entity expected to be flexible [2].…”