Journal of Management Information and Decision Sciences (Print ISSN: 1524-7252; Online ISSN: 1532-5806)

Abstract

Study of Lean Practices in Enabling Supply Chain Agility: A Literature Review

Author(s): Sharma, H., Sohani, N., & Yadav, A.

Today, there are many new technologies & optimization techniques are under development in Supply Chain Management, Lean has emerged as a very important & interesting field for the researchers as there is a very huge possibility in this area to work.  Find different tools and strategies for the optimization of the supply chain by eliminating waste as well as reducing cost for the fulfillment of customer needs. But for improving any supply chain’s responsiveness, which can be also termed as agility, very less work has been done so far and if we want to find an strategy which clubs both lean and agility somehow, then the supply chain performance can be improved both ways, efficiency as well as responsiveness. According to the authors, this is the first review paper that explores in detail lean practices in enhancing the supply chain and identifies latest emerging trend specially in enabling supply chain agility. The paper comprises a systematic & comprehensive review of articles on lean practices. Its role in supply chain agility enhancement using structured content analysis, and publications on lean, agile, and leagile strategies in automobile sector as well as in service industries published during the period 2005–2020.The classification of the reviewed article is done based on the basis of some characteristics as well as the contextual issues of the articles. 
Finally, future scope mentioned that there are several publications on lean but less on agile strategies, whereas only few  articles exists on ‘leagile’ paradigm. The findings will help all the interested stakeholders like educationists, researchers, industrialist etc. to understand various work done so far in optimizing the supply chain especially by the latest tools like lean implementation, agility & the leagility at any decoupling point of the supply chain. It will also help exploring the possibilities of the role of lean in enabling the supply chain agility.
 
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