Achieving competitive advantage through supply chain agility under uncertainty: A novel multi-criteria decision-making structure

The electronic industry suffers a rapid changing and highly rival environment. Thus, firms have an essential need to strive for acquiring the competitive advantage. Supply chain agility (SCA) is a tool which enable to assist firms to attain the competitive advantage. Therefore, this study benchmarks the core competencies from a case study within the supply chain network and establishes a set of attributes for augmenting SCA. A novel multi-criteria decision-making structure is proposed to deal with the complex interrelationships among the aspects and attributes. Fuzzy Delphi method uses for screening out the unnecessary attributes, then integrating fuzzy set theory with decision-making trials and evaluation laboratory method and closed-loop analytical network process to evaluate the SCA in determining the core competitive advantage. The empirical results indicate that flexibility significantly impacts by process integration, information integration and strategic alliances for eco-design in supply chain. Then, process integration has the highest influence in developing the competitive advantage of innovation. The managerial and theoretical implications are discussed.

Publisher Statement: NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in International Journal of Production Economics. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in International Journal of Production Economics, [190, (2017)] DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2016.08.027

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