Assessment of Supply Chain Agility Using Fuzzy Logic for a Manufacturing Organization

Increasing competition has been forcing the manufacturing organizations to adopt new manufacturing paradigms for producing products. Also, modern customers' demands are becoming dynamic. This situation has marked the evolution of a new manufacturing paradigm called Agile Manufacturing (AM). Supply Chain Management (SCM) is an essential ingredient of AM. Contemporary supply chains have acquired agile characteristics such as volatile market demand, high product variety, high profit margin, short product life cycle, etc. In this regard, the quantification of supply chain agility gains extreme importance as it indicates the strategic agile position of an organization from supply chain perspective. Few researchers have worked on the assessment of supply chain agility. This paper begins with the development of supply chain agility assessment model based on the literature review. The model is comprehensive in nature as it includes 20 different agile supply chain criteria and various agile supply chain attributes. Fuzzy logic approach has been used to compute supply chain agility. The case study has been carried out at XYZ manufacturing organization situated in Tiruchirappalli. The output of the case study includes the supply chain agility index, fuzzy performance important index of various agile supply chain attributes and the identification of principal obstacles. Various proposals for supply chain agility improvement have been derived based on the experiences from the case study. The proposals on implementation will lead to enhancement of profitability and increase in customer domain of the organization