ELK Asia Pacific Journals – Special Issue ISBN: 978-81-930411-8-5 LEAN, AGILE & LEAGILE SUPPLY CHAIN: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Lean and agile principles are two most buzzing words around the corporate in the past few decades. The industrial sectors throughout the world are upgrading to these principles to enhance their performance lowering their operating costs. Though, these principles have been proven to be efficient in handling supply chains, a more robust strategy is developed inheriting the salient features of both lean and agile principles. The synergy of the two principles, leagile, takes advantage of leanness by eliminating non-value added time and agility by additional reduction of value-added time via production technology breakthroughs. Though, all the three are directly focused on core competency, the suitability of each of them must be evaluated before implementation. The objective of this study is to perform a comparative analysis of the agile, lean and leagile supply chain which specifies the competitive features of the three strategies and their competency. In addition to this, different frameworks of leagile supply chain are presented suitable for different manufacturing industry. Key wordssupply chain; lean; agile; le-agile; decoupling