Edinburgh Napier University

  Over the past few decades the textile and apparel industry has experienced radical changes. This has been the result of customers becoming increasingly sophisticated, demanding more frequent innovation, greater exclusivity, more choice and better service. Companies have to constantly adjust their strategies and organisational structures in order to cope with this increasingly dynamic, complex, diverse and, most often, hostile business environment. These changes involve a re-engineering of business processes and a reconfiguration of business networks within the supply chain aiming at shorter product development and replenishment cycle times, increased flexibility and responsiveness to customer demand. Achieving these goals is even more difficult if we consider the intensive outsourcing, globalisation of both markets and the production, emergence of large, powerful retail groups and the development of new channels to market, such as the Internet, all this combined with increasingly diffuse and fragmented consumer-purchasing patterns, with a diversity of products and services being offered. Foresight is no longer plausible and forecasting, despite the sophistication of the system employed can be almost worthless.

All these environmental changes force companies to adopt more responsive, flexible and diverse methods of operations. But the ‘responsibility’ of creating such an agile business falls upon not only individual organisations, but on the whole supply pipeline too. However, such a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The ability to satisfy a volatile demand depends on the success of synchronising all the activities along the supply chain. The aim is to create an agile supply chain and, if the advantages of creating such a chain and its key processes are amply covered in the literature, the method of practical application and its impact on the overall performance remain unclear and uncertain. As such, the aim of this paper is to identify SCM best practice in a typically agile environment – the UK clothing sector – and reports on the findings of 3 case studies in this sector