Supply Chain Leagility: a New Perspective

To satisfy customers' diverse needs in the current hyper-competitive business environment, it is crucial for companies to adopt an appropriate design of supply chains. Several supply chain designs have been proposed by researchers which are mostly mutually exclusive such as lean versus agile. We questioned the validity of such designs and a new approach to supply chain leagility is probed, proposing all supply chains are leagile with different magnitudes of leanness and agility. An analysis of 299 Australian firms using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test revealed that most companies adopt leagile supply chain rather than pure lean/agile design.