Lean And Agile Strategy Analysis

In order to cope with the pressure of wide range of products with high quality in the market, the concept of "leagility" that combines lean and agile strategies was introduced for the companies (Lemieux et al., 2015). The common goal of the lean and agile supply chain strategies is to meet the customers’ demands at the lowest cost possible (Qi et al., 2007). Although the prerequisite for agility is to be lean, the desire to use low cost and high flexibility simultaneously might result in a contradiction. Cost reduction and elimination of losses that form the essence of lean strategy are short-term strategies in competition; however, agile strategy provides a long-term competitive advantage to the companies in handling the uncertainties and …show more content…
Naylor et al. (1999) argued that these two paradigms that were different from one another could be used in leagile strategy. In this one, strategies are not used together against one another. When organizations recognized that merging lean and agile strategies will bring a great advantage and superiority, leagility strategy emerged (Gaudenzi and Christopher, 2016). Many researchers have explored the leagile strategy in which lean and agile strategies are used simultaneously (Naylor et al., 1999; Childerhouse and Towill, 2000; Mason-Jones et al., 2000a; Christopher and Towill, 2000; Huang et al., 2002; Stratton and Warburton, 2003; Simchi-Levi et al., …show more content…
The postponement strategy aims at reducing the risks related to the product diversity through the joint utilization of materials and components and designing the production and distribution processes in a way to postpone the differentiation point (Van Hoek, 2000; Shao and Ji,