Supply chain flexibility assessment and decision-making: a fuzzy intelligent approach

Supply chain flexibility is considered as a major determinant of competitiveness in the global business market today. Flexibility is the organisation's ability to satisfy an increasing variety of customer expectations without excessive cost, time, organisational disruptions, or performance losses. Effective control of supply chain flexibility can improve overall organisational performance. The present study thus builds a group decision-making structural hierarchy model towards assessment as well as benchmarking of flexibility extent in supply chain management. This study presents a framework for evaluating supply chain flexibility through comprehensive analysis of past literature and identifies five elements (assessment indices) for characterising supply chain flexibility viz. supply network flexibility, operations systems flexibility, logistics process flexibility, information system flexibility, and organisational design flexibility. The subjectivity of the flexibility indices have been tackled through exploration of the concept of fuzzy logic; thus, enabling decision-making which involves linguistic expert judgment.