Modelling Supply Chain Flexibility in the Indian Personal Hygiene Industry: An ISM-Fuzzy MICMAC Approach

With the changing business environment, firms are adopting flexible systems across their supply chains as a survival as well as a growth strategy. The aim of the article is to identity the key enablers of supply chain flexibility (SCF) adoption and to evaluate their fitness in the context of the personal hygiene industry in India. After a systematic literature review, 22 key dimensions of SCF have been extracted. A field investigation through interviews and a brainstorming session with industry experts have resulted in 11 dimensions, finally. Twenty-six experts participated in this interview and brainstorming session. These 11 dimensions have been exposed to interpretive structural modelling (ISM) to assess the hierarchal interaction among them. Fuzzy MICMAC has been employed to identify the driving dimensions of supply chain flexibility for the personal hygiene industry. The findings suggest that seven dimensions, namely process, manufacturing, sourcing, volume, market, new product development and coordination, have high dependence but weak driving power and are thus dependent on the other dimensions to influence the supply chain flexibility. Demand management and product flexibilities were found to have the strongest driving force and act as the key drivers for SCF. The originality of the conducted study lies in the multilevel hierarchical structure.