1. Agility Review

Theconcept of agility is often limited to “agile manufacturing”. However, it hasbeen very much argued that agility should be far more wide ranging and allrelated logistics operations need to be integrated. In other words, agilityshould be taken into account from the perspective of the whole supply chain,which in much of recent research has been recognized as “Agile Supply Chain”. (Harrison & Christopher, 1999)

Agilesupply is concerned with developing capabilities proactively to position asupply chain to benefit from volatile marketplaces in which product life cyclesare shrinking, product variety is increasing, and the ability to forecastdemand is reducing.  

Atruly agile supply chain is deemed to possess a number of distinguishingcharacteristics. First, the agile supply chain is customer responsive, by which we mean that the supply chainis capable of reading and responding to end-customer demand. Second, the supplychain should be viewed as a network of partners who have a common goal to collaborate together in order to respondto end-customer needs. The third component of agility is viewing the network asa system of integrated businessprocess, whereby in the past “stand alone” processes tended to createpenalties in terms of time, cost and quality for the whole network. Fourth, useof information technology to share data between supply chain points enables acompany to achieve a virtual supply chain, which is information-based rather than inventory-based (Harrison, 2005). 

2. Distinguishing “Lean” and “Agile”

Inthe 1990s, the focus on “world class” status and continuous improvement has ledto a proliferation of competitive strategies such as manufacturing flexibility,total quality management, lean production and business process re-engineering. Popularizedin the book: “The Machine that Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production”(Womack et al, 1990), lean production is a management philosophy which aims toeliminate waste in order to fulfill customer orders “just in time”, withoutstanding levels of quality. Unnecessary inventory, processing and waitingtimes and the productions of defective goods are all examples of sources ofwaste, which should be eliminated.