NEW SUPPLY CHAIN CONCEPTS, FLEXIBILITY AS A KEY PARAMETER OF AGILE SUPPLY CHAINS

Abstract

Optimization of supply chains results new models, concepts of value chains and new organization and cooperation forms of members. Nowadays growing market globalization, increasing global competition, more and more complex products requires new production technologies, methods and processes. The product life cycle is getting shorter and shorter, the complexity of final products is increasing and new customer demands require efficient operation of supply chains. Usually three new supply chain concepts are used, the lean, the agile and leagile supply chains. Different manufacturing systems are using these chain concepts, Dedicated Manufacturing Lines (DML) are using lean, Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) agile and Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS) are using leagile concepts. In this paper we introduce supply chains and the relating manufacturing systems. We also give an overview of flexibility constraints as an important requirement of nowadays manufacturing, applied in agile supply chains.

Keywords

• supply chain
• manufacturing system
• lean
• agile
• flexibility