Assignment Requirements

Lean or Agile?

In their article ‘Lean or Agile’, Bruce, Daly and Towers state that:
“The major constraints that SME’s face include limited financial resources, lack of personnel and time, little or no experience and limited confidence in implementing new systems. As a result, many small companies are either unable to invest in marketing, design and innovation activities”.
The article goes on to discuss how the market forces surrounding SME’s in the textile industry impact upon the appropriateness, selection and implementation of lean and/or agile business strategies.
Questions:
Several businesses in various sectors have adopted lean and/or agile business strategies have SME’s in their supply chains, they include:
• Packaging
• Retail
• Electronics
• Food Processing
• Construction
• Public sector
• Financial services

Choose one of the above sectors and with reference to the above article, consider the applicability of flexible and customer focused business strategies to the supply chains of your choosen business sector and answer the following questions. Your answer must describe your supply chain and discuss the following questions in detail:

• Discuss how management decides which, lean and / or agile, strategy is most appropriate for their business?
• How can Information Technology (IT) be used and/or changed to manage the information flow and help configure your supply chains to provide flexible response to customer demand?

• It is important for the business to manage the trade-off’s between costs, lead times and demand volatility. Describe and discuss how the changes made can be sustained?

• Within your sector describe the barriers to the choosing a lean and/or agile strategy?

Guidance:
• The assignment should be fully referenced and be not more than 3000 words excluding appendices.
•The candidates answer would be expected to identify and discuss the following:
Identify what the lean and agile strategies are and how management must perform in order to integrate the supply chain in a manner which, whilst is integrated and seamless, concentrates on producing to customer demand, rather than to forecasts, right the way up the value stream.
Discussion should identify the applicable lean and or agile business strategies that their sector should and could adopt, and how the supply chains should be configured to take best advantage of them.

Structure:
• Use of headings, sub headings etc.
• Define terms
• Present logical argument
• Can link back to literature during discussion and conclusion
• Clear referencing of text
• If used, Diagrams, Tables – must be referenced & numbered
• Past tense
• 30 References – include all sources that you use / Citing and Referencing should be in the Harvard Style

Conclusions:
• Include those results which surprised you & which may appear, at first sight, counter-intuitive to others
• Identify further avenues of development
• Implications for your organisation, area of research

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