The impact of flexibility on operational supply chain planning

We study in this paper the effects of volume flexibility, delivery flexibility and operational decision flexibility in operational supply chain planning under uncertain demand. We use a rolling schedule to plan supply chain operations for a whole year. The planning horizon is 4 weeks with deterministic demand in the first week and predicted for the following 3 weeks. Using a case from the Norwegian meat industry, we compare the annual operating results of using a two-stage stochastic programming model to the deterministic expected value problem in order to discuss the impact of flexibility in the supply chain. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.