Agility is business-wide capability that embraces organiza- tional structures, information systems and in particular, minds sets (Christopher, 2000). Agility means using market knowl- edge and virtual corporation to exploit profitable opportunities in a volatile marketplace (Mason-Jones & Towill, 1999).
Table 1 provides various ways in which agility has been defined in literature.
Christopher (2000) has identified a number of characteristics that a supply chain must have in order to be “truly agile”(Fig. 1):
• Market sensitive — it is closely connected to end-user trends.
• Virtual — it relies on shared information across all supply chain partners.
• Network-based — it gains flexibility by using the strengths of specialist players.
• Process integration — it has a high degree of process interconnectivity between the network members.