Flexibility configurations for the supply chain management

Facing a dynamic and complex environment, networked companies often require the coordination of many plants, which produce and deliver goods to customers located in different places, and suppliers, which provide each plant with the required components. A way to optimize the product flows in supply chains (SCs) is to adopt the concept of limited flexibility, that is a particular configuration of product assignments to plants and components to suppliers which can yield many benefits without dramatically increasing the flexibility costs. In this paper, a simulation model is proposed to evaluate the performance of different configurations of a SC. In particular, based on a work-in-process and time performance analysis, the different configurations are analyzed in order to support the selection of suitable flexibility degrees of the operations network. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.