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1. Introduction
In the mid-1960s, competitiveness significantly increased, challenging firms to change their strategies. At that time, cost was at the forefront of firms’ concerns. Years later, quality became the priority. However, since a firm’s performance depends heavily on customer satisfaction, delivery speed became as important as cost and quality. As the market became more and more complex, customization appeared. Firms from this time onward were urged to adapt to the changing environment and become flexible and agile in order to satisfy market demand.
Flexibility and agility are two characteristics that enable firms to gain a competitive advantage and to face variations in demand, and they characterize the current market (Chiang et al., 2012; Yang, 2014). However, articles and literature reviews on flexibility and agility often confuse the two concepts and use both “flexibility” and “agility” to refer to the same thing (Swafford et al., 2008; Bernardes and Hanna, 2009; Yi et al., 2011; Eckstein et al., 2015; Fayezi et al., 2017; Um, 2017).
This confusion comes from the undefined and unclear boundaries between flexibility and agility. While a number of researchers consider that agility is centered on flexibility (Sharifi and Zhang, 1999; Prater et al., 2001), others argue that agility is an extension of flexibility (Vokurka and Fliedner, 1998; Backhouse and Burns, 1999). However, as will be explained in this paper, flexibility is just a component of agility, and agility is a more global concept that became topical with the rise of market volatility and the trend of firms to migrate to a more agile supply chain (SC) (Christopher and Towill, 2000).
This paper is a literature review of articles on flexibility and agility, and has a double purpose: the first is to trace the evolution of agility and flexibility over time, and the second is to clarify the boundaries between the two concepts. By analyzing papers on flexibility and agility in both manufacturing and SC studies from 1920 to 2017, we attempt to answer the following research question:
What is the relationship between flexibility and agility?
Our main hypothesis is that agility is the normal evolution of flexibility over time.
Our literature review stands out from the existing literature reviews on flexibility and agility because of...