4.2 Suggestion s of propositions
In general, the cases revealed that all companies strive to be both agile and robust in
order to utilize the specific advantages of each approach.
One company from the electronics industry states:
We want to be agile and robust. This should be true for all companies.
This position is supported by a car manufacturer:
The supply chain is normally very robust, whereas there is also a lot of agility at the same time.
And while companies aim at being agile and robust at the same time, this does not imply
being it in the same areas. Our findings reveal that agility tends to be of particular
importance on the customer side of a company (i.e. downstream in the supply chain).
This observation is consistent with our survey results in that the supply chain’s
customer value is impacted especially by the agility of firms.
While a proactive strategy via a robust configuration requires risks and their effects
to be known ex ante, an agile configuration is also able to deal with unforeseen and
unforeseeable risks that may originate from the customer side. Here, for example one
of the companies from the train industry, who is faced with constant changes in
product requirements by the customers, highlights that agility is crucial to deal with
fluctuations on the demand side.
Furthermore, the case studies show that robustness is rather required on the
supplier side (i.e. upstream in a supply chain). For instance, multiple suppliers are
helpful, if the quality of a component is low or a supplier has a high insolvency risk.
This finding first of all implies that supplier-related risks tend to be more predictable
as otherwise a proactive approach would not be feasible and effective. Additionally, the
effects of a supplier-related disruption may be bigger for the companies as this may
affect the production related to many customers.
While robustness is regarded as the best approach, it has to be noted that in
some cases agility has to be applied as second-best option. A manufacturer of
high-performance cars stated that multiple suppliers would be nice to have. However,
as it relies upon constantly identifying new suppliers of highly innovative
components rather than developing and standardizing such components in-house,
mostly no alternative suppliers can be implemented. The consequent dependencies
are dealt with via an exceptional ability to rapidly identifying new supplier,
i.e. improved agility.