ALIGNMENT OF BUSINESS STRATEGY AND SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT: a study of medium-to-large-sized internationalized German companies from an international business student perspective

In an increasingly globalized world, effective supply chain management and its alignment with a company’s business strategy is seen as a firm’s competitive advantage. Existing studies, which were conducted in internationally known companies, suggest three main strategies: Lean, agile and leagile supply chain strategies. Lean supply chain strategies in markets with a stable demand follow a cost-minimizing approach. Agile supply chain strategies in markets with an unpredictable demand focus on differentiation, innovation and flexibility in order to fulfill customer-specific demand. Finally, leagile supply chain strategies try to combine lean aspects for a base demand and agile aspects for more customer specification. This study researches internationalized medium-to-large-sized German companies with the purpose of understanding how companies can improve their supply chain management from an international business perspective. Results are based on the analysis of qualitative data collected through 14 semi-structured interviews with employees from the SC or business department. Findings suggest that lean, agile and leagile supply chains exist as described in the literature. Furthermore, the supply chain strategies called ‘project’ SC and ‘capable’ SC were found. Project SCs are used for a fixed period of time in order to conduct customer-specific ventures. They are a specialized version of agile SCs with the difference that they are constructed from scratch. Capable SCs are characterized by delivery reliability and speed and customer closeness in markets with predictable demand. They can be considered an advancement of leagile SCs. Furthermore risk- hedging SC management was researched. Moreover, the changes in strategies over the years were examined and the meaning of increased automation and usage of computerized systems in the context of industry 4.0 were questioned. The results show that changes and technology play different roles according to industry. In conclusion the findings cannot be generalized due to the small sample size. However, the results give an insight into current supply chain management strategies that can lead to the practical implication of integrating the customer more in the SC. In the future SCs could have increased transparency, flexibility, and simultaneity. Further quantitative research is recommended.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

A K-Chart based implementation framework to attain lean & agile manufacturing

[EN] Lean manufacturing has always ensured production optimization by eliminating wastes, and its implementation has helped in improving the operational performance of the organization since it eliminates the bottlenecks from the processes, thus making them efficient. In lean scenarios, the focus is on “waste” elimination, but in agile manufacturing, the focus is on the ability of comprehension of changing market dynamics and the resilience. One of the major factors in the combined implementation of lean and agile approaches is inadequate planning, monitoring and lack of awareness regarding changing market trends, and this can be countered by utilizing the effective tool of K-Chart. Through a systematic literature review, the authors establish the requirement of effective planning and monitoring in the implementation of integrated lean and agile approach, concluding that K-Chart is a handy tool to adopt for their effective implementation. The result provides a new vision of lean implementation through K-Chart, whereas it provides clarity to practitioners by presenting a K-chart based implementation framework for achieving favourable results. Being a literature review the research work can be validated through a case study approach in future through a comparative analysis between various implementation techniques and K-Chart.Zaheer, S.; Amjad, M.; Rafique, M.; Khan, M. (2020). A K-Chart based implementation framework to attain lean & agile manufacturing. International Journal of Production Management and Engineering. 8(2):123-135. https://doi.org/10.4995/ijpme.2020.12935OJS12313582Abdullah, M. K., Mohd Suradi, N., Jamaluddin, N., Mokhtar, A. S., Abu Talib, A., & Zainuddin, M. F. (2006). K-chart: a tool for research planning and monitoring. J. of Quality Management And Analysis, 2(1), 123-130.Abdullah, M. K., Suradi, N. R. M., Jamaluddin, N., Mokhtar, S., Talib, A. R. A., & Zainuddin, M. F. 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Scrum2Kanban: Integrating Kanban and Scrum in a University Software Engineering Capstone Course

Using university capstone courses to teach agile software development methodologies has become commonplace, as agile methods have gained support in professional software development. This usually means students are introduced to and work with the currently most popular agile methodology: Scrum. However, as the agile methods employed in the industry change and are adapted to different contexts, university courses must follow suit. A prime example of this is the Kanban method, which has recently gathered attention in the industry. In this paper, we describe a capstone course design, which adds the hands-on learning of the lean principles advocated by Kanban into a capstone project run with Scrum. This both ensures that students are aware of recent process frameworks and ideas as well as gain a more thorough overview of how agile methods can be employed in practice. We describe the details of the course and analyze the participating students' perceptions as well as our observations. We analyze the development artifacts, created by students during the course in respect to the two different development methodologies. We further present a summary of the lessons learned as well as recommendations for future similar courses. The survey conducted at the end of the course revealed an overwhelmingly positive attitude of students towards the integration of Kanban into the course

Leanness and agility as means for improving supply chains. A case study on Egypt

Supply chain management has received greater attention from the academics and the practitioners, however the literature review lacks a comprehensive view for supply chain management practices and how its members should act to contribute to its overall success (Li el at., 2005). In this era, where the business organisations are working in several challenging threats and opportunities, greater attention is given to supply chain management. Nowadays, companies are always searching for means to improve their supply chains. The main aim of this research is to show "how leanness and agility approaches can be used within the same enterprise as complementary means for improving its supply chain". To achieve this research objective, the research has provided an assessment and summarised the literature on the supply chain management, lean thinking and agility thinking including their importance; their definitions; their practices and the relationship between lean and agility. The resulted proposed framework deduced from the literature has been applied in the Egyptian Manufacturing Business to show the relationship between the agility principles, lean principles, entity performance and the successful supply chain

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Performance optimization of a leagility inspired supply chain model: a CFGTSA algorithm based approach

Lean and agile principles have attracted considerable interest in the past few decades. Industrial sectors throughout the world are upgrading to these principles to enhance their performance, since they have been proven to be efficient in handling supply chains. However, the present market trend demands a more robust strategy incorporating the salient features of both lean and agile principles. Inspired by these, the leagility principle has emerged, encapsulating both lean and agile features. The present work proposes a leagile supply chain based model for manufacturing industries. The paper emphasizes the various aspects of leagile supply chain modeling and implementation and proposes a new Hybrid Chaos-based Fast Genetic Tabu Simulated Annealing (CFGTSA) algorithm to solve the complex scheduling problem prevailing in the leagile environment. The proposed CFGTSA algorithm is compared with the GA, SA, TS and Hybrid Tabu SA algorithms to demonstrate its efficacy in handling complex scheduling problems

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Lean supply is closely associated with enabling flow and the elimination of wasteful variation within the supply chain. However, lean operations depend on level scheduling and the growing need to accommodate variety and demand uncertainty has resulted in the emergence of the concept of agility. This paper explores the role of inventory and capacity in accommodating such variation and identifies how TRIZ separation principles and TOC tools may be combined in the integrated development of responsive and efficient supply chains. A detailed apparel industry case study is used to illustrate the application of these concepts and tools

Influential factors of aligning Spotify squads in mission-critical and offshore projects – a longitudinal embedded case study

Changing the development process of an organization is one of the toughest and riskiest decisions. This is particularly true if the known experiences and practices of the new considered ways of working are relative and subject to contextual assumptions. Spotify engineering culture is deemed as a new agile software development method which increasingly attracts large-scale organizations. The method relies on several small cross-functional self-organized teams (i.e., squads). The squad autonomy is a key driver in Spotify method, where a squad decides what to do and how to do it. To enable effective squad autonomy, each squad shall be aligned with a mission, strategy, short-term goals and other squads. Since a little known about Spotify method, there is a need to answer the question of: How can organizations work out and maintain the alignment to enable loosely coupled and tightly aligned squads? In this paper, we identify factors to support the alignment that is actually performed in practice but have never been discussed before in terms of Spotify method. We also present Spotify Tailoring by highlighting the modified and newly introduced processes to the method. Our work is based on a longitudinal embedded case study which was conducted in a real-world large-scale offshore software intensive organization that maintains mission-critical systems. According to the confidentiality agreement by the organization in question, we are not allowed to reveal a detailed description of the features of the explored project

Shipbuilding 4.0 Index Approaching Supply Chain

The shipbuilding industry shows a special interest in adapting to the changes proposed by the industry 4.0. This article bets on the development of an index that indicates the current situation considering that supply chain is a key factor in any type of change, and at the same time it serves as a control tool in the implementation of improvements. The proposed indices provide a first definition of the paradigm or paradigms that best fit the supply chain in order to improve its sustainability and a second definition, regarding the key enabling technologies for Industry 4.0. The values obtained put shipbuilding on the road to industry 4.0 while suggesting categorized planning of technologies