An Empirical Study On Supply Agility In Pakistan Fast-Moving Consumer Goods Industry

Globalization is transforming the way business organizations perform their operations and interact with their supply chain partners.Supply Chain Management(SCM)has become one of the most popular approaches to enhance the competitiveness of business organizations in today' s marketplace.SCM encompasses activities related to the transformation of information,process and material into finished goods and their distribution to end buyers at the right time and place.The prior research largely comes from developed countries and revolves around the firm's specific resources and capabilities as a means of competitive advantage.Dynamic capabilities are effective means to survive and thrive in a turbulent business environment.Dynamic capabilities put forth their effect in a hierarchal way such as lower-order capabilities enable higher-order capabilities to bring value to the organization.Supply chain agility is a critical dynamic capability deemed to exploit the emerging business opportunities and competitively handle market disruptions.Drawing on the resource-based view and dynamic capability view,this study seeks to underline the empirical relationships among antecedents and consequences of supply chain agility in a developing country context.In this thesis,three significant questions are formulated to address the issues through conclusive arguments.The first question primarily focuses on empirically investigating the role of IT capabilities(i.e.IT infrastructure,IT assimilation),and supply chain integration(i.e.information integration,process integration)in determining supply chain agility in firms across various FMCG industries in Pakistan.The results of structural path analysis reveal that supply chain integration mediates the effects of IT capabilities on supply chain agility.In addition to the direct effects,IT infrastructure has an indirect effect on information integration and process integration through IT assimilation whereas information integration indirectly affects supply chain agility through process integration.The second research question formulated to ascertain the pathway through which supply chain integration(i.e.information integration,process integration)and supply chain flexibility(i.e volume and mix)put their effect on supply chain agility.The results of the partial least square structural equation modeling(PLS-SEM),reveal that supply chain flexibility partially mediates the effects of information integration and process integration on supply chain agility.Furthermore,drawing on the contingency perspective of the dynamic-capability view,we perform a moderated-mediation analysis to examine the contingency effect of product-related complexity on the aforementioned relationship of supply chain integration(i.e.information integration,process integration)and supply chain agility through supply chain flexibility.The results of moderated mediation analysis indicate that product complexity has a bi-directional moderating effect on the pathway through which supply chain integration(i.e.information integration,process integration)and supply chain flexibility influence supply chain agility.Product complexity strengthens the positive significant effects of information integration and process integration on supply chain agility whereas it deters the positive significant effect of supply chain flexibility on supply chain agility.Besides,the conditional indirect effects are suggested which show that the positive indirect effects of supply chain integration(i.e.information integration,process integration)on supply chain agility via supply chain flexibility become stronger when product complexity is low.At third,we determine the enabling role of supply chain flexibility and supply chain agility in realizing the firm's competitive performance.The results of PLS-SEM underscore that supply chain agility fully mediates the relationship between supply chain flexibility and the firm's competitive performance.Also,we establish a mediated moderation model to emphasize the mediating role of supply chain agility on the interactive effect of supply chain flexibility and product complexity on a firm's competitive performance.The results of mediated moderation analysis reveal that supply chain agility completely mediates the interactive effect of supply chain flexibility and product complexity on a firm's competitive performance.The study,contributes to theory,policy and practice from an organizational capability perspective.The study deepens our understanding of the hierarchy of capabilities by empirically investigating the structural relationships among lower-order IT capabilities and higher-order supply chain capabilities in bringing value to the firm.Furthermore,it educates firms to concentrate on supply chain-related competencies to gain the business advantage in a dynamic market place.