Canonical Correlation between Strategic Design Requirements and Performance Measures of Lean and Agile Supply Chains - A Case Study in Small and Medium Enterprises

Companies seeking to survive in the business need to meet the customer demands for variety, time, price and quality. The challenge faced by a supply chain delivering fashion products is to develop a strategy that will improve the match between supply and demand and enable the companies to respond faster to the market. These results in three fundamental supply chain strategies namely, lean strategy; agile strategy; lean and agile (leagile) strategy; A suitable supply chain can be designed once the relationship between strategic design requirements (SDRs) and supply chain performance measures (SPMs) is understood. The aim of this paper, is investigating interactions between SDRs and measures of supply chain performance. To do this after reviewing the literature and identification of SDRs and SPMs, a questionnaire in respect of lean and agile supply chain was developed and distributed to three types of medium and small scale industries, namely (i) apparel manufacturing (ii) automotive spare parts and (iii) electronic components. Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) was used to assess the relations between the SDRs and SPMs. Research findings indicate that that there is the significant and positive relationship between SDRs and SPMs.