The agile supply chain in turbulent and volatile market

Agility is the fundamental characteristic of a supply chain needed for survival in turbulent and volatile markets, which are becoming normal, as product life cycles shorten and environmental forces create additional uncertainty resulting in higher risk in the supply chain management.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT (IJM) ISSN 0976-6502 (Print) ISSN 0976-6510 (Online) Volume 7, Issue 2, February (2016), pp 01-11 http://www.iaeme.com/ijm/index.asp Journal Impact Factor (2016): 8.1920 (Calculated by GISI) www.jifactor.com IJM ©IAEME THE AGILE SUPPLY CHAIN IN TURBULENT AND VOLATILE MARKET Dr K Abdus Samad Director & Research Supervisor, Jamal Institute of Management, Jamal Mohamed College (Autonomous), Tiruchirappalli – 20 A S Mubarak, Dubai, U.A.E Research Scholar Jamal Institute of Management, Jamal Mohamed College (Autonomous), Tiruchirappalli-20 ABSTRACT Agility is the fundamental characteristic of a supply chain needed for survival in turbulent and volatile markets, which are becoming normal, as product life cycles shorten and environmental forces create additional uncertainty resulting in higher risk in the supply chain management Agility further helps in providing the right product, at the right time to the consumer, which is the main objective of any supply chain Being responsive is an increasingly important skill for firms in today's global economy; thus firms must be agile Naturally, it follows that an organization's agility depends on its supply chain being agile However, achieving supply chain agility is a function of other abilities within the organization, specifically supply chain flexibility and technology integration The integration enables a firm to tap its supply chain flexibility which in turn results in higher supply chain agility and ultimately higher competitive business performance Key words: Agility, Supply chain, Lean, Flexibility, B2B, Collaboration, Globalization, Manufacturing Cite this Article: Dr K Abdus Samad and A S Mubarak The Agile Supply Chain in Turbulent and Volatile Market International Journal of Management, 7(2), 2016, pp 01-11 http://www.iaeme.com/ijm/index.asp INTRODUCTION Agility is a business-wide capability that embraces organizational structures, information systems, logistics processes and, in particular, mindsets A key characteristic of an agile organization is flexibility Indeed the origins of agility as a business concept lie inflexible manufacturing systems (FMS) Initially it was thought that the route to manufacturing flexibility was through automation to enable rapid change (i.e reduced set-up times) and thus a greater responsiveness to changes in product mix or volume Later this idea of manufacturing flexibility was extended into the wider business context and the concept of agility as an organizational orientation was born Agility should not be confused with ‘leanness’ Lean is about doing more with less The term is often used in connection Dr K Abdus Samad and A S Mubarak, “The Agile Supply Chain In Turbulent and Volatile Market” – (ICAM 2016) International Journal of Management (IJM), ISSN 0976 – 6502(Print), ISSN 0976 6510(Online), Volume 7, Issue 2, February (2016), pp 01-11 © IAEME Publication with lean manufacturing to imply a ‘zero inventory’, just-in-time approach Paradoxically, many companies that have adopted lean manufacturing as a business practice are anything but agile in their supply chain The car industry in many ways illustrates this conundrum The origins of lean manufacturing can be traced to the Toyota Production System (TPS), with its focus on the reduction and elimination of waste THE IMPACT OF LEAN AND AGILE SUPPLY CHAIN Market globalization and steep competition are increasing the need for more efficient and effective strategies in meeting evolving market demands Adopting a more integrated approach to supply chain relationship management has been increasingly viewed as a way of meeting changing customer needs Lean and agility frameworks used as tools for achieving supply chain integration Lean and agility are important tools to achieve supply chain integration, but respondents are yet to fully achieve the transition to lean/agile enterprise Generally, respondents are implementing lean/agile principles in cooperation and collaboration with suppliers and customers, demand pull system, and using combination of strategies However, it is clear that adequate market information is required when trying to fit lean/agile principles into supply chain strategy Furthermore, all respondent recognize the need for change to satisfy customer need, but the respond to change vary from one company to another Also, there is a gradual shift from traditional focus solely on cost and profit to customer relation relationship management and customer satisfaction Consequently, companies are organizing themselves around the customer who pulls goods and value from the producer of the goods COMPLEXITY IN SUPPLY CHAIN OPERATIONS The resilience for capturing the dynamics of turbulence and vulnerability into the concept of a ‘supply chain,’ adds to its complexity Better understanding of the concept of a supply chain is critical for the network of companies involved in the upstream and downstream flows of products, services, finances, and information from the initial supplier to the ultimate customer Therefore, to deal from the beginning with the vast degree of turbulence and complexity in supply chains requires an enterprise view with collaboration among all business functions within the firm , as well as inter-organizational alignment among supply chain members, otherwise inbound and outbound logistics Because, frequent changes, in the turbulent corporate environment, result in increasing complexity and vulnerability Supply chain incorporates three main flows: material, information and cash flow Material flow activities aim at delivering to the final customer, via procurement of raw materials, manufacturing, distribution and customer service These must be managed from upstream to downstream, based on the bidirectional flow of information and the movement of money from downstream to upstream Dr K Abdus Samad and A S Mubarak, “The Agile Supply Chain In Turbulent and Volatile Market” – (ICAM 2016) International Journal of Management (IJM), ISSN 0976 – 6502(Print), ISSN 0976 6510(Online), Volume 7, Issue 2, February (2016), pp 01-11 © IAEME Publication Flows in the supply chain Sufficient understanding of SCM is very useful, as well as of how it emerged and how it has been rapidly progressed to become mainstream at research and application level Also, the implications of advance to SCR, acknowledged as a ‘revolutionary change’ must be realized, since it has been attributed as comparable to the scientific management and planning that emerged just about one century ago Seeds of these changes go back to early after the 2nd world war, by severe criticism of the functional firm structure and side effects of fragmentation of management, against coordination and effectiveness Especially, the distribution functions, such as procurement and replenishment, transport and warehousing, marketing and selling were treated in the past as ‘cost burden’ and ‘liability’ Therefore, the emergence of logistics as a scientific discipline deals with their interdependent management, taking into consideration the trade-offs and the potential positive effects in cost, quality, time, service and value creation to the final users The use of such effects has been supported by assignment of ‘noncore’ functions to third parties (outsourcing: 3PL), upon the ‘make-or-buy question’ Processes are specified and classified in two categories: core processes which express the main business goal and non-core ones, which are supplementary and can be assigned to outsourcing The make-or-buy decisions have to be based on strategic integrated planning at supply chain level The next historical advance was the drive to further strengthening of the role of Logistics with entire move to interfirm supply chain level with stable interdisciplinary collaboration SCM is an integrated concept throughout the supply chain as a source of value maximization and total cost minimization, based on interrelationships mix in a network sense, was put in action later Different experts have been discussing the usefulness of sustainable management systems (SMS) as holistic systems that might integrate environmental, social and economic elements Focus has turn to value creation to the customers through higher service quality This new change has helped in clearing up alternative distinctive firm strategies to ensure competitive advantage: ‘cost leadership’, ‘product differentiation’ and ‘combined focus’, with marked contribution of Porter An arbitrary taxonomy in differentiated frameworks of the changes includes the following: the focus in ‘cost leadership’ strategies during the 1970’s was followed by ‘product differentiation’ during 1980’s 1990's has been earmarked by the socalled ‘globalization phenomenon’, after the unprecedented peaceful collapse of the central planning system in Europe by late 1980’s To face the challenge of adjustment to the new ever changing transactions environment, there has been a further major change for first time in the economic history, characterized by the unification of firms at supply chain level, the so called business process or supply chain re-engineering Further attention during the first decade of the new millennium was given to the so-called sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) and to the issue of agility and later on to resilience, putting vulnerability and sustainability, in the mainstream of attention The rebuilding of a supply chain into a SCM network has been subject to a very complicated exercise that requires longrun collaboration, holistic strategy, discipline, sandcontrol Dr K Abdus Samad and A S Mubarak, “The Agile Supply Chain In Turbulent and Volatile Market” – (ICAM 2016) International Journal of Management (IJM), ISSN 0976 – 6502(Print), ISSN 0976 6510(Online), Volume 7, Issue 2, February (2016), pp 01-11 © IAEME Publication EXTENDED SUPPLY CHAIN Clarification of many other relevant concepts is associated with the historical change, such as integration, holistic character, networks, value strategy, management systems (MS), power structure, institutional flexibility, etc Such issues are increasingly studied without always sufficient specification, in a variety of fields, including cybernetics and governance, academy, politics, and non-governmental organizations, also being used by the general population LEAN MANUFACTURING CONCEPTUAL IDEOLOGY The term Lean was first used by Krafick in 1988, a principle researcher in the International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to describe what today is known as the Lean Manufacturing or Lean Production paradigm A major output of the IMVP research efforts was the publication of the book, The Machine that Changed the World: The story of lean production The book chronicled the operations found in the automotive industry, capturing the dramatic differences in approach and ensuing performance found among the world's leading automakers In particular, the book examined how the techniques employed by Japanese automakers, namely Toyota, outpaced the performance achieved by U.S and European competitors Much has been written in the academic and popular business press about Toyota's much envied competitive weapon, the Toyota Production System Every industrialized country has now fully recognized the importance and benefits of lean ideology Lean manufacturing is it uses half of everything human effort in the factory, manufacturing space, investment in tools, engineering hours to develop a new product It makes use of its tools to strive for zero inventories, zero downtimes, zero defects, and zero delays in the production process The implementation of lean principles in any organization begins by identification of the value stream; Value is all the aspects of a product that a customer is willing to spend his/her money on it i.e., all those activities, required to manufacture a product (goods, services) to a customer The numerous activities performed in any organization can be categorized into the following three types Value adding Activities - which include all of the activities that the customer acknowledges as valuable Non Value Adding Activities -These include all the activities that the customer considers as non-valuable, either in a manufacturing system or in the service system , Waste can be described as the opposite side of value on a Lean coin These are pure wastes and involve unnecessary actions that should be eliminated completely Necessary but Non Value Adding Activities - These include the activities that are necessary under the current operating conditions but are considered as non-valuable by the customer Lean manufacturing focuses on elimination of waste (or "muda" in Japan) Taiichi Ohno believed that fundamental for any company's success was the elimination of waste Ohno (1988) developed a list of seven basic forms of muda,  Overproduction (production ahead of demand)       Transportation (unnecessary transport of products) Waiting (waiting for the next production step) Inventory (all components, work-in-progress and finished product not being processed) Motion (unnecessary movement of operator equipment) Over processing (unnecessary processing) Defects in production (the effort involved in inspecting for and fixing defects) Womack and Jones (1996) added to this list with the muda of goods and services that fail to meet the needs of customers Lean protest the need for an organization to develop a culture of continuous improvement in quality, cost, delivery and design Production is agile if it efficiently changes operating states in response to uncertain and changing demands placed upon it Production is lean if it is accomplished with minimal waste due to unneeded operations, inefficient operations, or excessive buffering in operations So it is concluded that while agility presumes leanness, leanness might not presume agility Lean production can be effectively utilized to remove wastes to improve business performance Emphasis on the elimination of loss and the waste of resource factors is largely Dr K Abdus Samad and A S Mubarak, “The Agile Supply Chain In Turbulent and Volatile Market” – (ICAM 2016) International Journal of Management (IJM), ISSN 0976 – 6502(Print), ISSN 0976 6510(Online), Volume 7, Issue 2, February (2016), pp 01-11 © IAEME Publication associated with lower inventory which is very clearly shown by analyzing the "rock and ship" analysis In this analysis, as the stock (water level) is reduced, sources of waste (rocks) appear in the form of latency, poor quality conformity, prolonged preparations, unreliable processes etc the removal of these losses is caused to lower inventory without a negative effect on the flow of materials (ships) Womack, Jones, and Roos add that in comparison to a mass production approach, a lean company calls for far less inventory and incurs fewer defects while providing greater variety in products AGILE MANUFACTURING CONCEPTUAL IDEOLOGY The term ‘agile manufacturing’ refers specifically to the operational aspects of a manufacturing company which accordingly, try to translate into the ability to produce customized products at mass production prices and with short lead times Agile manufacturing is a new idiom that is used to represent the ability of a producer of goods and services to survive and flourish in the face of continuous change These changes can occur in markets, technologies, business relationships and all other facets of the business enterprise Agile manufacturing can be defined as the capability of surviving and prospering in a competitive environment of continuous and random change by reacting quickly and effectively to changing markets, driven by customer-designed products and services According to Naylor et al (1999), “agility means applying market knowledge and a vital corporation to exploit profitable opportunities in a rapidly changing market place” The relation between agility and flexibility is extensively discussed It has been proposed that the origins of agility lie in flexible manufacturing systems Agility can be obtained by systematically developing and gaining capabilities that can make the supply chain reflect rapidly and diversely to environmental and competitive changes Consequently, these firms need a number of distinguishing attributes to promptly deal with the changes inside their environment Such attributes include four main elements: responsiveness, competency, flexibility/adaptability and quickness/ speed The base for agility is the amalgamation of information technologies, staff, business process organization, innovation and facilities into main competitive attributes The main points of the definition of may be summarized as follow:  High quality and highly customized products       Products and services with high information and value-adding content Recruitment of core competencies Responsiveness to social and environmental issues Combination of diverse technologies Response to change and ambiguity demand Intra-enterprise and inter-enterprise integration Dr K Abdus Samad and A S Mubarak, “The Agile Supply Chain In Turbulent and Volatile Market” – (ICAM 2016) International Journal of Management (IJM), ISSN 0976 – 6502(Print), ISSN 0976 6510(Online), Volume 7, Issue 2, February (2016), pp 01-11 © IAEME Publication The implementation of agile strategies has some benefits for firms, including quick and efficient reaction to changing market demands; the ability to customize products and services delivered to customers, the capability to manufacture and deliver new products in a cost-efficient model, decreased producing costs, enhanced customer satisfaction, elimination of non-value-added activities and increased competitiveness The most publications on agility strategies can classified into four categories: 1 Conceptual models and framework for achieving agility, this mainly includes, dimension, enablers, aspects and theoretical model 2 Paths to agility , which considered the flexibility practices in terms of "volume flexibility ,modification flexibility and delivery flexibility " and responsiveness from three facets, volume , product, process are vital paths to agility 3 Measuring and assessing the performance of agility these include the exploration of rules for assessment, the identification of criteria and the establishment of agility index, which was proposed as a way of measuring the intensity level of agility attributes was developed 4 The development of agility in a supply chain context Therefore, agility has been advocated as the commerce paradigm of the century and in addition agility is considered the winning strategy for becoming a general leader in an increasingly competitive market of quickly changing customers’ requirements Agile manufacturing aims to meet the changing market requirements by suitable alliances based on core-competencies, by organizing to manage change and uncertainty, and by leveraging people and information Agile manufacturing does not represent a series of techniques much as it represents an elementary change in management philosophy It is not about small-scale improvements, but an completely different way of doing business with a primary emphasis on flexibility and quick response to the changing markets and customer needs LEAGILE MANUFACTURING CONCEPTUAL IDEOLOGY Agility in concept comprises; responding to change (predictable or unexpected) in the appropriate ways and due time, and exploiting and taking advantage of changes, as opportunities Harrison and Van Hoek (2005)argue that “where demand is volatile, and customer requirements for variety is high, the elimination of waste becomes a lower priority than responding rapidly to the turbulent marketplace” The lean production philosophy with its current set of tools will not be able to tackle the increasing demand for customer specific products, favoring , organizations to move towards more agile production philosophies, considered to be better suitable to handle customer specific requirements with flexibility and responsiveness With increasingly customized products, the ‘mass markets’ will be split into multiple niche markets in which the most significant requirements will tend to move towards service level Recognized cost as the market winner for systems operating on the lean manufacturing philosophies In all cases named above costs, quality, and lead time are market qualifiers where they are not market winners Rapid changes in the business environment and uncertainty have been part of management studies and research for a long time, so managing uncertainties still remains one of the most important tasks for organizations Production is agile if it efficiently changes operating states in response to uncertain and changing demands placed upon it Production is lean if it is accomplished with minimal waste due to unneeded operations, inefficient operations, or excessive buffering in Dr K Abdus Samad and A S Mubarak, “The Agile Supply Chain In Turbulent and Volatile Market” – (ICAM 2016) International Journal of Management (IJM), ISSN 0976 – 6502(Print), ISSN 0976 6510(Online), Volume 7, Issue 2, February (2016), pp 01-11 © IAEME Publication operations So it is concluded that while agility presumes leanness, leanness might not presume agility Lean production is a broad concept and encompasses terms such as flexible manufacturing, mass customization and even agile manufacturing” When lean tools are effectively applied taking into consideration agility, one can increase flexibility by further introducing safety stocks, or operating with some free capacity This will ensure that the supply chain is robust to changes in end consumers requirements However, Naylor et al warns that leanness and agility are mutually exclusive and cannot be simultaneously applied at the same point in a supply chain While leanness operates best when planning horizons are long and products variants few, agility requires reactivity to customer orders in short uncertain planning horizons and highly customized product variants This has resulted to the coining of a new production philosophy; leagile According to Agarwal leagility, is a philosophy best suited for an entire supply chain and not for a single point in the supply chain Leagile blends the lean and agile Christopher and Towill expanded the discussion in Naylor et al (1999) and Mason-Jones et al (2000a, 2000b) supported the concept of hybrid manufacturing strategies and identified three practical ways of combing the lean and agile paradigms:  The first is via the Pareto curve approach; adopting lean for the 20% class high volume products having 80% of the demand and agile for the 80% having 20 % of the demand  The second is the use of a decoupling point or postponement principle A de coupling point is a position in the supply chain where one production paradigm takes over from another Since the lean philosophy focuses on cost efficiency along the whole value chain its tools can because to run operations up to the decoupling point, in a cost efficient way While the agile production principles are applied on the other side of the decoupling point But then, there are still some challenges like determining the position of a decoupling point such that the burden is rightfully divided across the participants in the supply chain At the same time it is important to have the decoupling point closer to the customer so that lean practices can be applied to a greater portion of the value chain Since its position depends on end user, lead time sensitivity, and further, on where the variability is greatest in the supply  The third approach is to separating demand into base and surge demand, using lean for base demand and agile for surge demand the term Agile or leagile should remind us that we must be responsive to change and uncertainties We may need to come up with a number of other metrics required of our management systems and processes, all of which may exist within the companies already working at the level of best practice and based on the same basic good manufacturing practices, but the lean tools still remain the foundation These three strategies were complementary rather than mutually exclusive, and yet it was likely that each would work better than others in certain contexts In addition to decoupling point identification, there are other approaches to achieve a leagile supply chain One such method is transshipment, naturally led to coordinated replenishment policies across locations Another approach was proposed by Stratton and Warburton (2003) They argued that leanness and agility were in practice caught in a trade-off conflict However, if it were possible to define explicitly the trade-offs, then a solution to resolve this contradiction was possible In this way, they interpreted the conflict nature in terms of dependency, fluctuation, inventory and capacity, and then systematically linked such tradeoffs to develop another approach This approach was combined with other approaches: the theory of Dr K Abdus Samad and A S Mubarak, “The Agile Supply Chain In Turbulent and Volatile Market” – (ICAM 2016) International Journal of Management (IJM), ISSN 0976 – 6502(Print), ISSN 0976 6510(Online), Volume 7, Issue 2, February (2016), pp 01-11 © IAEME Publication inventive problem solving and the theory of constraints Inventive problem solving of a number of principle-based solution systems was applied to solve the physical contradictions between leanness and agility while theory of constraints was resolving trade-offs for highly complementing to inventive problem solving However, although there may exist various ways to combine them, it is significantly important that lean production is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for achieving agility (Kidd, 1994; Robertson and Jones, 1999; Mason-Jones et al., 2000b; Furthermore, agility cannot be achieved without experiencing relevant stages of leanness MasonJones et.al (2000a) presented two reasons for this fact First, lean and agile supply chains share many common features that help speed up the achievement of leagility Hence, agility may be initiated by building on the relevant features of leanness Second, agility requires control of all processes in the supply chain It is difficult, if not impossible, to see how agility can be acquired without having first gone through the process enhancement stage of lean production B2B (BUSINESS TO BUSINESS) INTEGRATION WITH SUPPLY CHAIN PARTNERS The use of information technology to share data between buyers and suppliers is, in Effect, creating a virtual supply chain Virtual supply chains are information based rather than inventory based Conventional logistics systems are based upon a paradigm that seeks to identify the optimal quantities of inventory and its spatial location Complex formulae and algorithms exist to support this inventory-based business model Paradoxically, once we have visibility of demand through shared information, the premise upon which these formulae are based no longer holds Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and now the Internet have enabled partners in the supply chain to act upon the same data i.e real demand, rather than be dependent upon the distorted and noisy picture that emerges when orders are transmitted from one step to another in an extended chain Shared information between supply chain partners can only be fully leveraged through process integration By process integration is meant collaborative working between buyers and suppliers, joint product development, common systems and shared information This form of co-operation in the supply chain is becoming ever more prevalent as companies focus on managing their core competencies and outsource all other activities In this new world a greater reliance on suppliers and alliance partners becomes inevitable and, hence, a new style of relationship is essential In the ‘extended enterprise’ as it is often called, there can be no boundaries and an ethos of trust and commitment must prevail Along with process integration comes joint strategy determination, buyer-supplier teams, transparency of information and even open-book accounting This idea of the supply chain as a confederation of partners linked together as a network provides the fourth ingredient of agility There is a growing recognition that individual businesses no longer compete as stand-alone entities but rather as supply chains We are now entering the era of ‘network competition’ where the prizes will go to those organizations who can better structure, coordinate and manage the relationships with their partners in a network committed to better, closer and more agile relationships with their final customers It can be argued that in today’s challenging global markets, the route to sustainable advantage lies in being able to leverage the respective strengths and competencies of network partners to achieve greater responsiveness to market needs Many types of manufacturing database management and inventory control systems exist today Each of these systems views the process from the narrow viewpoint of the goals of such a system For example, inventory control processes tend to determine when the inventory of an item is projected to be depleted and when to order goods to prevent such depletion The inventory control process does not generally take into account the problems associated with availability of materials and machines to satisfy the inventory demand On the other hand the manufacturing control process considers the availability problem but does not take into account the effect of a sales promotion that will deplete an inventory faster than projected A marketing department in preparing a sales promotion will often not Dr K Abdus Samad and A S Mubarak, “The Agile Supply Chain In Turbulent and Volatile Market” – (ICAM 2016) International Journal of Management (IJM), ISSN 0976 – 6502(Print), ISSN 0976 6510(Online), Volume 7, Issue 2, February (2016), pp 01-11 © IAEME Publication consider the effect that promotion will have on availability, inventory and profit margin but tends to focus on sales goals What is needed is a system that will support managers with each of these viewpoints in understanding the effect of the various decisions that can be made on the supply chain as a whole both currently and into the near future SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT PARTNER COLLABORATION In meeting a challenging business environment, the emergence and rapid extension of SCM has not to be conceived as prescription, savior and a safety belt True that no single firm can anymore ensure effective provision of product (or product/service bundle) since inefficiency, delays and other ‘wastes’ (i.e non-value adding activities) can emerge anywhere in a disorganized supply chain Contemporary effective integrated supply chain can create maximum end-user value, with agents working together as partners The real challenge is how to marry collaboration with competition, by designing and coordinating in order to create the desired value for the customer throughout the whole supply chain Facing this new era of business practices, successful winners will be those that can collaborate and work together with all partners, in a supply chain committed to better, faster and closer relationships with the final users The modern electronic high technology can facilitate collaboration and information for sharing risks and costs, taking an equitable share in the outcomes to be created The partners can be motivated to help each other, to improve collectively the operational efficiency towards eliminating eliminate waste, so that the whole chain will be optimized and integrated as a single system The sense of collaboration in the network supply chain level is to achieve high collective capabilities and performance, beyond temporary long-term cooperation Collaboration goes side by side with coordination, involving a set of relations to develop seamlessly linked activities between and among trading partners, through JIT systems and other mechanisms Thus, co-ordination is not sufficient for the overall SCM and therefore it calls for a new sense of collaboration True collaboration partnerships are based on high levels of trust, commitment, consistency and information sharing among the partners Partners throughout the supply chain must be integrated in a user customership relation so that to attain maximum satisfaction for the final users Thus, there can be significant impact on own performance as well as that on the whole supply chain Close collaboration with partners, including manufactures, suppliers, distributors, transporters and end-customers are the key to success A climate of closer collaboration among all partners creates common goals for the mutual benefit of each individual partner Failing to collaborate would result in the distortion of information, which, in turn, can lead to inefficiencies, excess stock, slow response and lost profits Collaboration enables partners to gain a joint understanding of future product demand and to implement realistic programmes for satisfying it and yielding major business benefits: increase in the market share, stock reductions, reduction in cost and lead-time, improved quality and shorter product development cycles Collaboration in the supply chain Dr K Abdus Samad and A S Mubarak, “The Agile Supply Chain In Turbulent and Volatile Market” – (ICAM 2016) International Journal of Management (IJM), ISSN 0976 – 6502(Print), ISSN 0976 6510(Online), Volume 7, Issue 2, February (2016), pp 01-11 © IAEME Publication The changing business environment has called for close collaboration in the form of extended enterprise, adaptive supply chain, and linking of firms into learning organizations, with knowledge to become ‘the currency of exchange’ , through frequent exchange of status information All activities for movement of materials and information should be operated through collaboration with partners in a synchronized and coordinated way 10 CONCLUSION The phenomenon of increasing vulnerability, along with the globalization the high relevance of the resilience issue rests in mitigating risks of unexpected events, ensures company sustainability in turbulent environmental conditions, due to economic, social, technological and physical climate changes Management has to traditionally recognize the importance of logistics and supply chain management as a key element in gaining advantage in the marketplace However, in today’s more challenging business environment, where volatility and unpredictable demand becomes normal, it is essential that the importance of agility to be recognized in the organization Thus the organizations will be best outfitted for endurance in the turbulent and volatile markets REFERENCES [1] 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and not for a single point in the supply chain Leagile blends the lean and agile Christopher and Towill expanded the discussion in Naylor et al (1999) and Mason-Jones... having 80% of the demand and agile for the 80% having 20 % of the demand  The second is the use of a decoupling point or postponement principle A de coupling point is a position in the supply chain. .. Collaboration in the supply chain Dr K Abdus Samad and A S Mubarak, ? ?The Agile Supply Chain In Turbulent and Volatile Market? ?? – (ICAM 2016) International Journal of Management (IJM), ISSN 0976 – 6502(Print),