Designing of an agility control system: a case of an Indian manufacturing organization

Abstract

Purpose

Agility is the ability of an organization to adjust its supply chain tactics and operations to respond quickly against altering business environments such as fluctuating demand pattern, supply chain disruption and global competition. An agile organization must possess a promising capability of swiftly responding to dynamic conditions while being cost-effective without compromising the efficiency. Such high-performance adaptability necessitates the role of supply chain managers to maximize the agility of the supply chain through the efficient use of input resources. Therefore, the purpose of this study to reveal a new decision support tool that would allow the key decision-makers to maximize the agility of the supply chain while deploying the input resources more effectively.

Design/methodology/approach

In present study, an integrated approach of popular analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and goal programming (GP) has been adopted as a potential solution methodology. AHP has been implemented to allocate the local and global weights to decision variables, whereas GP incorporates the AHP weights into the desired model.

Findings

It was found that the proposed decision support tool restricts the value of the decision variables for maximizing the agility and optimizing the usage of input resources. The results obtained from the model validate the objective of achieving targeted agility level within the available resource limitations.

Research limitations/implications

The decision support tool developed in the proposed study offers a systematic and effectively simple approach to supply chain managers with a goal of identifying the degree of focus under each decision variable in the respective manufacturing organizations.

Originality/value

A novel decision support tool has been developed known as an agility control system), which helps the decision-maker to achieve the required agility in the supply chain by controlling the decision variables.

Citation

Singh Patel, B., Samuel, C. and Sutar, G. (2020), "Designing of an agility control system: a case of an Indian manufacturing organization", Journal of Modelling in Management, Vol. 15 No. 4, pp. 1591-1612. https://doi.org/10.1108/JM2-08-2019-0206