Assessment of Supply Chain Agility in a Cloud Computing-based Framework

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to evaluate the supply chain agility behaviour consisting in the development of an integrated index, with the data gathering, transmission and processing supported by a cloud-computing environment. The proposed approach relies on the development of two agility indices: one to assess the individual company agile behaviour, and the other one to determine the same behaviour for the entire supply chain. The supply chain is presented as a living, self-organizing open system that has the ability to incorporate new efficient agents and to remove the weakest ones. A special emphasis is given to the living subsystem responsible for the agility assessment, namely regarding the conceptual details of the components necessary to gather, process, coordinate and control the flow of information in the cloud.