Manufacturing and supply chain flexibility: an integrated viewpoint

Global competitive market, rapidly changing demand and high product variety are some of the factors that require enterprise flexibility. Industries require adaptability in their system to cope with these environmental uncertainties. Literature review in the domain of flexibility indicates existence of factors that necessitate flexible resource capability in manufacturing and supply chain resources and processes. The present work provides an insight with this as the framework. Based upon the various flexibility frameworks available in literature for manufacturing and supply chains, the authors provide a framework of flexibility that accommodates the inherent hierarchy in manufacturing and supply chain flexibilities. An integrative flexibility framework is then presented. The explorations suggest the need to quantify supply chain flexibility in terms of the actor‐based framework.