A Framework for Operational Agility: How SMEs Are Evaluating their Supply Chain Integration

This chapter seeks to show how small medium enterprises (SMEs) have become more responsive to deal with the unexpected changes in the business environment. However, the impact on SME’s is not always clear, as resources required to implement such strategic responsiveness are often fall beyond what is considered to be acceptable risk. In this chapter an integrated approach is proposed to facilitate the ‘responsiveness’ when faced with uncertainty and environmental turbulences in supply chain design thus contributing to the notion of Operational Agility and Supply Chain Integration (SCI). The framework is based on earlier work developed by the authors, which focused on the integration of operational agility tools and techniques through external intervention. An implementation model is presented in which the practical aspects of the framework stages are presented. The framework is validated through case study observations, a number of issues raised in the framework are discussed and validated.