The Impact of Cloud Manufacturing on Supply Chain Agility

Cloud manufacturing (CMfg) arises as a novel paradigm for enabling future manufacturing companies to be responsive, (re)-configurable, adaptable, and flexible, in one word: agile. CMfg allows companies to deploy and manage all the manufacturing information over the network improving enterprises visibility/transparency while opening the doors to the implementation of the global manufacturing enterprise. Thus, CMfg is radically changing the role played by enterprises Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) solutions in both strategic and operational level. In this scenario, agility is a fundamental indicator that has been widely used by academic and industrial communities for evaluating the performance of the network based business such as Supply Chains. It is believed that CMfg can directly affect the agility of an enterprise. Consequently, the main purpose of this work is to analyse the impact of CMfg on Supply Chain agility. Since Supply Chain agility can be categorized in two clusters, namely: capabilities and enablers, then the main objective is to quantify the impact of CMfg on these two categories of agility. To handle the complexity of the problem the DEMATEL model as an effective method for collecting and structuring experts' knowledge is employed. The result could facilitate the investment decision and provide a better understanding on how to use CMfg efficiently to develop Supply Chain Agility (SCA).