The Role of Supply Chain Antecedents on Supply Chain Agility in SMEs: The Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Firms must be agile for the reason that being responsive is a crucial competency for them in present global economy. Organizations that are agile happen to be more successful. The agility of an organization is dependent on the agility of its supply chain. The main aim of this paper is to give a new dimension in explaining how Trust, Information Technology (IT) and agility can create sustained competitive advantage for firms and develop an integrated framework to facilitate this. For the literature review of the related academic articles for the previous studies has been taken by international journals in Logistics, Supply Chain Management and Operations Management. Achievement of supply chain agility (SCA) is linked to the other organization’s resources, namely trust, IT and firm performance that play mediator role between them. IT is considered as a competitive tool by researchers and practitioners. Therefore, it is crucial for managers to apply their firms' IT and trust as lower-order organizational capabilities to improve agility as a higher-order organizational capability. Hence, the current article gives a conceptual framework to ascertain factors which affect SCA and finally firm performance. The findings of this study will present interesting information and insight about how to improve agility in small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). Moreover, the information presented in this study will be the foundation of future supply chain capability studies. To aid the study, this present study for develop the framework has been used the RBV theory. The paper also proposes the framework for future research in empirical investigation in companies. The study related the gap by developing a framework for measuring SCA, which enables any organization to identify critical success factors for sense and respond to market.