Supply chain agility plays a critical role in improving the performance of businesses. Among the aspects supply chain agility can influence include boosting customer service ensuring that customers expect products to be available at the correct location, on time and receive after sales support. Besides, supply chain agility helps to reduce operating costs through decreasing purchasing cost, production costs and total supply chain cost (Christopher 2000). The CSCO of the Laundry and Home Care division attests to the fact that supply chain agility influences the business in two ways. In order to ensure that Laundry and Home care division maintain and improve their performance, it should factor current situation as well as initiatives aimed at transforming the business and maintain a competitive advantage.
This research aims to evaluate the current supply chain agility at Laundry and Home division to determine how it has influenced the German chemical and consumer products. The results from this research will play a significant role in explaining how supply chain impacts businesses.
The research proposal will:
The research proposal will determine how supply chain agility initiatives helps to improve the performance of Laundry and Home Care division.
Laundry and Home care division is among companies that are owned by a German chemical and consumer goods. The company is classified under three business segments which comprise technological, beauty care and laundry and home care. The company is aware of how significant the supply chain agility is critical to their business performance. The CSCO of the Laundry and Home care division often inform his staff that the supply chain agility influences there business in two main ways. The first ways the CSCO suggests is to ensure agility since demand is bound to change over a couple of days. The second way relates to the company being a branded goods manufacturer. In this regard, 40% of the sales are generated through products that were launched over a period of three years. This implies that the ability of the company to launch new products in a fast and reliable manner is the key to the company’s business strategy. Moreover, the business agrees that a number of supply chain initiatives have boosted their business transformation, it is necessary that the company maintains supply chain agility as a result of stiff competition, constant cost pressures and volatile market (Prater, Biehl and Smith 2001). Therefore, the current supply chain situation needs to be evaluated before other initiatives are implemented to guarantee exemplary performance.
This section will address the problem which this research aims to solve.
The findings of this this research project will provide basis with which Laundry and Home Care division strives to maintain agility of their supply chain management to ensure that it performs well.
The management issue to be addressed by this research proposal is:
How can Laundry and Home care maintain supply chain agility in the face of stiff competition, constant cost pressures and volatile market?
The main and specific objectives to be achieved in this research are outlined as follows:
Main objective
Specific Objective
There are five business supply chain agility dimensions which include alertness, accessibility, decisiveness, swiftness and flexibility.
Alertness is a term that refers to the ability of a firm to detect changes opportunities and weaknesses in an organization. Businesses that are considered agile require fundamental knowledge in sensing, perceiving and expecting changes throughout the supply chain management Ngai et al 2011). Therefore alertness is said to be the ability to recognize, react and respond to changes. Alertness plays a significant role in realizing the desired agility within the information systems and development research. Studies indicate that agility is responsible for evaluating the environment to identify areas that are likely to bring challenges for the business. Besides, other firms emphasize on agility as a means of identifying opportunities and threats. Therefore, the supply chain process must be capable of recognizing and responding to the demands of the business (Gligor, Esmark and Holcomb 2015). However, there are various limitations suggested by various authors. For instance, there are no distinct capabilities of agility in supply chain because it aims at responding to real demand capabilities. More so, agility has the capability to read demand without necessarily making reference to the supply.
Accessibility as a dimension with respect to agility refers to the ability of a firm to access relevant data that can improve the performance of supply chain management. As a result, the firm should find relevant data to respond with agility once alertness capability has identified changes. Various information related to supply chain process is significant for a particular firm to use in improving supply chain agility. Besides, a supply chain process that is considered agile must have distinctive attributes. This implies that agile supply chain tend to be virtual rather than inventory based (van Hoek, Harrison and Christopher 2001). As a result, the supply chain stakeholders must frequently provide real-time demand, inventory and information related to production. Making such information available is significant in helping a firm to access relevant information for decision making purposes. Other researchers suggests that the requirements for designing supply chain agility is pegged on creation of an environment where significant information for decision making can be accessed. Both information systems and development research provide important evidence that considers integration of data as a vital factor that enhances agility.
The term decisiveness refers to the ability to make decisions quickly. Moreover, agility depends on the ability to make informed decisions based in relevant and available information. The time required for decision making is determined by the time elapsed between stimuli and response. This means that firms have the ability to control alertness and accessibility with respect to agility as well as offering relevant information that would allow quick response. There is extensive research that focuses on the impact of decision making skills with respect to agility (Swafford, Ghosh and Murthy 2006). Based on a simulation conducted on football players, it revealed that professional players have the ability to make decision much faster as compared to players who just enrolled. This research presupposes that majority of open skilled sports are dependent on exemplary decision making skills. Therefore, decision making skills should be integrated with agility training programs. Further, it indicates that decision making strategies consequently lead to various levels of agility. In regards to supply chain context, there is a clear distinction between agility and speed. This implies that an elaborate supply chain agility should go beyond establishing the abilities that recognize challenges quickly and access relevant information to deal with the changes. Therefore, firms should enhance the ability to make important decision on how to respond to changes (White et al 2005).
Swiftness as a dimension of agility refers to implementing decisions quickly. An agile supply chain process must be structured to ensure that an activity is completed within the shortest time possible. More so, swiftness can be considered as the ability of a firm to accelerate activities according to the goals and objective of an organization (Braunscheidel and Suresh 2009). Some researchers recognize swiftness as a crucial aspect in supply chain agility because it considers the ability to carry out duties and operations as quickly as possible. Besides, agility in the context of business refers to the speed with which a firm carries out its operations.
Flexibility is the last dimension of agility which is concerned with the ability change a number of tactics as well as operation framework to be aligned with business objectives. Therefore, the ability of a firm to respond to changes is pegged on the flexibility of its supply chain operations framework. Most firms operate within a specific range that implies the supply chain process will be considered based on that specific range (Swafford, Ghosh and Murthy 2008). For instance, a firm’s capability to produce goods is dependent on its capacity of manufacturing.
This research process will use qualitative research design whose aim will be to investigate how agility impacts the performance of supply chain management. The research will use secondary sources to identify patterns that will be used in the discussion. Secondary sources provide extensive research on how existing firms maintain agility in their firms.
The sources of data that will be used for this research will come from both primary and secondary sources. The primary data will be collected through a survey that will be sent to various departments within the organization to determine the current situation of the supply chain management. The secondary sources for this research will be collected through existing peer reviewed journals and business reports for purposes of collecting information regarding the most effective strategies to increase agility in the supply chain. Secondary data is significant for this research for the purpose of drawing patterns that enable the research to clearly identify specific patterns that relate to agility in the supply chain process. Only relevant information that will answer the research question will be used for this research.
All the relevant material that will be used in this research will aim at answering the research question to provide solutions on how agility improves the supply chain performance. The information will be crucial in helping Laundry and Home care services to improve their supply chain agility and performance.
The study will focus on Laundry and Home care services in order to determine specific situation that relates to agility and how it impacts the performance of the supply chain process.
The paper will interpret the findings from the survey as well as identify patterns in secondary sources which will be significant decision making purposes.
The findings of this research will be used to justify why the business requires a more agile supply chain as well as recommend other initiatives that will enhance the overall performance of the supply chain process.
Data collection will be conducted through a survey questionnaire and secondary sources will be collected from trade journal, peer revived articles and business reports.
Data analysis for this research will employ deductive approach which involves using the research question and collected data to evaluate similarities and differences. This approach will be used based on the limited time available for research. The data will also be analyzed through inductive approach to establish relationships in the data collected. Also, the research process will use coding to analyze information received through the questionnaire.
The researchers are expected to conduct themselves with the highest level of conduct. This means that some of the characteristics that the research must have include honesty and integrity, objectivity, carefulness, openness, respect for intellectual property and confidentiality among other attributes.
The research process takes significant time to prepare, collect, analyze and developing a research. Besides, in qualitative research, problems are likely to go unnoticed if the researcher is not keen with all the processes. Also, the interpretation of findings is limited to research process and personal experience which influences observation. Other limitations include labor intensive as a prerequisite, lacks verification and often difficult to interpret causality.
The following Budget and time frame is based in estimation which are subject to change based on the researcher’s timeline.
Reference List
Braunscheidel, M.J. and Suresh, N.C., (2009). The organizational antecedents of a firm’s supply chain agility for risk mitigation and response. Journal of operations Management, 27(2), pp.119-140.
Christopher, M., (2000). The agile supply chain: competing in volatile markets. Industrial marketing management, 29(1), pp.37-44.
Gligor, D.M., Esmark, C.L. and Holcomb, M.C., (2015). Performance outcomes of supply chain agility: when should you be agile?. Journal of Operations Management, 33, pp.71-82.
Ngai, E.W., Chau, D.C. and Chan, T.L.A., (2011). Information technology, operational, and management competencies for supply chain agility: Findings from case studies. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 20(3), pp.232-249.
Prater, E., Biehl, M. and Smith, M.A., (2001). International supply chain agility-Tradeoffs between flexibility and uncertainty. International journal of operations & production management, 21(5/6), pp.823-839.
Swafford, P.M., Ghosh, S. and Murthy, N., (2006). The antecedents of supply chain agility of a firm: scale development and model testing. Journal of Operations Management, 24(2), pp.170-188.
Swafford, P.M., Ghosh, S. and Murthy, N., (2008). Achieving supply chain agility through IT integration and flexibility. International Journal of Production Economics, 116(2), pp.288-297.
van Hoek, R., Harrison, A. and Christopher, M., (2001). Measuring agile capabilities in the supply chain. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 21(1/2), pp.126-148.
White, A.E.D.M., Daniel, E.M. and Mohdzain, M., (2005). The role of emergent information technologies and systems in enabling supply chain agility. International journal of information management, 25(5), pp.396-410.
Zikmund, W.G., Babin, B.J., Carr, J.C. and Griffin, M., 2013. Business research methods. Cengage Learning.
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