A supply chain flow model to assess agility in supply chains

This paper addresses the relevant topic of supply chain agility. Our work proposes a quantitative approach to evaluate and improve agility, in the context of a serial end-to-end supply chain. We define a metric to assess the agility of a supply chain. Then, we develop a supply chain flow model that integrates various parameters related to physical and information/decision flows such as production and logistics/transportation capacities and lead times, frozen planning horizons, target stocks horizontal ellipsis This flow model is then used to simulate the supply chain information and physical flows in the nominal mode and when a situation needing agility happens. The model enables to calculate the agility metric when no action is done as well as in situations where the use of some agility levers is considered. A numerical study is presented allowing to illustrate the model developed in this work. We also discuss some interesting insights we have obtained from real-life applications of our model.