<i>simultaneously</i> ensuring that suppliers behave as if they had long-term sourcing commitments from buying firms. In … business to a supplier from their own sourcing needs, even if they no longer prefer this supplier. Unlike existing theories of …

an architecture that facilitates development process flexibility. We provide examples from our fieldwork to support this …

consistently perform near optimally. Using these heuristics, we perform experiments on the effect of operating flexibility on … project duration, where resource flexibility is measured by the number of resources available per activity, and the form of … flexibility on project duration. For instance, it is found that when the flexible capabilities of the resources are evenly …

Various models have been developed over the years to analyze the many facets of the flexibility of production and … operations systems. This paper proposes a general framework for the modeling and analysis of flexibility. The argument hinges … upon the distinction between flexibility---a property of the technology---and diversity---a property of the environment in …

be reduced to an equivalent substitution flexibility problem without those dedicated components. This significant …. "Pure commonality" strategies are never optimal unless complexity costs are introduced. Dual sourcing, externalities, and …

flexibility. Contrary to the intuition also prevalent in the academic literature, we show that it can be advantageous to invest in …

Process flexibility, whereby a production facility can produce multiple products, is a critical design consideration in … multiproduct supply chains facing uncertain demand. The challenge is to determine a cost-effective flexibility configuration that … flexibility in multistage supply chains. We find two phenomena, stage-spanning bottlenecks and floating bottlenecks, neither of …

In this paper, we present a new perspective on flexibility in manufacturing and service operations by exploring a type … of operational flexibility that we term Üstructural flexibility (SF).Ý We focus on strategic-level issues of how … flexibility can be created by using multipurpose resources such as cross-trained labor, flexible machines, or flexible factories …

resource portfolio investment. The resources differ by their level of flexibility, where "level-k flexibility" refers to the … with multiple products and parallel resources. This simple approach is sufficiently powerful to prove that (i) flexibility … exhibits decreasing returns and (ii) the optimal portfolio will invest in at most two, adjacent levels of flexibility in …