Towards a Proactive Flexibility Management View

This paper examines the concept of flexibility from a practitioner's point of view to seek the essence of the concept and to address certain fundamental questions in the minds of the practitioners, such as, what is flexibility? Why do we need it? How does it matter for business performance? How it is created and exploited? In Part-I of this paper, we examine various notions and definitions of flexibility found in the literature, the stated objectives and articulated needs for flexibility, the fundamental beliefs underlying the concept and the conceptual models proposed in the literature. Based on this, we propose a proactive flexibility management view, which, we believe, will advance the understanding of the concept of flexibility by practitioners. We also present a number of propositions on flexibility, capturing the essence of the concept from a practitioner's point of view.