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Is agility a binary concept?
Supply Chain agility is often perceived as a binary concept… Are we agile or not? Teams often ask me how to become agile!
Agility is actually a continuum. No supply chain can achieve full agility, when concepts like consumer tolerance time, inventory, and lead time disappear. The closest to achieving it is the Reflex Action in our body.
No supply chain can exist with zero agility either, otherwise it would cease to function.
All the supply chains are agile and all have a lot of distance to cover. What really matters is not how agile we are, but how is our improvement journey on the agility scale.
Agility sets the broad direction of improvement. Can we reduce changeover times and minimum batch sizes at the bottlenecks? Can we reduce lead times and MOQ with vendors? Can we service the primary, secondary and tertiary lanes more frequently? Can we decipher demand shifts faster? Can we replan faster? Can we execute faster?
There is no limit to these improvements to get more agile. However, we must prioritize these improvements at the system constraint, the bottlenecks and other leverage points, to get higher overall system benefits for our efforts.
Way to go…