5. Conclusion
Departing from a somewhat heterogeneous literature base on agility and robustness
and the expectation that both strategies may be important in improving the supply
chain’s customer value and business performance, our research provides strong
support for this assumption.
Being agile has a strong positive effect on the supply chain’s customer value, while its
impact on business performance is mediated by the supply chain’s customer value and,
thus, is indirect only. In contrast, achieving robustness has a strong positive direct effect on
both the supply chain’s customer value and business performance. This is an
important observation, because in the last years both researchers and managers paid a
lot of attention to agility, whereas robustness turns out to be the real driver of business
performance.
In line with the positive effect agility has on the supply chain’s customer value, the
exploratory cases revealed that agility is a particularly effective strategy in the case of
high customer-side risks. The direct influence of robustness on business performance
can be explained by the increasing prevalence of high volatility in supply chains
(Christopher and Holweg, 2011). Supply chains need to consider robustness to be able
to withstand this ever-occurring volatility risks. The case studies provide insights to
the fact that robustness can be considered a basic prerequisite to deal with
supplier-side risks, while agility is necessary to deal with customer-side risks. These
findings helps managers to select the appropriate supply chain strategy based on
risk-based context factors, which, in turn, can help to shape a supply chain design that
not only leads to improved business performance, but also to improved customer value
and, consequently, societal benefits.
Our hypotheses that SCRM is important for both agility and robustness of a supply
chain are supported. This coincides with the descriptions of managers interviewed as
part of our case studies. Thus, the implementation of SCRM, which entails the
identification, assessment, and controlling of risks, allows companies to better cope
with changes both proactively and reactively. Besides other possible facilitators of
agility and robustness, such as cooperation, insurance, and postponement, it turns out
that SCRM is a strong driver of realizing these two strategies. This is an important
argument for managers who consider the introduction of SCRM. Most importantly,
companies, who are searching for a means to improve agility and robustness of their
supply chains, find that the introduction of SCRM can be a powerful supplement to
more traditional means such as excess capacities and safety stocks.
Further, it is learnt from the cases that choosing and achieving appropriate levels of
agility and robustness needs to be aligned to the competitive strategy.
It was aimed to reduce possible research limitation, but it is necessary to point to the
following issues. First, all participants were located in German-speaking countries
only. Second, except for control variables, no objective data was drawn on. Due to the
fact that mainly high-level key informants participated, their judgments can be highly
relied on. Third, mainly OEM and first-tier suppliers participated in both the survey
and the case studies. Therefore, generalizability may be partially problematic for
companies further upstream in the supply chain (although we do not have any
indication that this actually is the case). Further, for some of the constructs an even
broader operationalization could have been possible. Research propositions yielded
from the case study were not tested empirically. This is a possible starting point for
further research. In spite of these issues, we are convinced that our findings provide an
important extension to the evolving literature on SCRM.
Besides customer value, further research might also investigate the impact of agility
and robustness on other broader aspects of supply chain performance and along the
supply chain. We also encourage more research to focus specifically on supply chain
robustness, due to its importance for both the supply chain’s customer value and
business performance.