| Summary: | 碩士 === 逢甲大學 === 工業工程與系統管理學研究所 === 95 === Flexibility is defined as the capability of a system to respond to unpredictable changes of its internal or external environment. Flexibility not only increases the competitiveness of a manufacturing system, but also improves the performance of a supply chain. Over the past few decades, most researchers in this field stressed on the flexibility of a manufacturing system, but ignored the importance of the flexibility of a supply chain. Due to globalized competition, solving the flexibility problems for manufacturing systems of an organization may not benefit the overall supply chain in which the organization is involved in and even for the organization itself. This study summarizes the issues about the flexibility applied to a supply chain and uses a simulation package (Flexism) to explore two of the flexibilities (sourcing flexibility and volume flexibility) of a supply chain. The sourcing flexibility represents the company’s ability of finding an alternative supplier for purchasing specific components or raw materials. The volume flexibility means that the supplier allows a flexible quantity for an order, instead of taking a fix-sized order.
From our simulation results, the volume flexibility can improve the performance of overall supply chain, however, the sourcing flexibility can only improve the performance of the retailers. In addition, it can be observed that the volume flexibility and sourcing flexibility can significantly improve the performance of the overall supply chain under increasing the demand variance of customers.
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