Building supply chains as flexible system represents one of the most exciting opportunities to create value. This requires integrated decision making amongst autonomous chain partners with effective decision knowledge sharing between them. For any decision process, one of the main inputs required is the available knowledge. Hence, it is important to have the actual real time knowledge for the decision process. Knowledge sharing has immense potential to offer, expedient opportunities to create and retain greater value for supply chains. In this context, knowledge management (KM) can be used as an effective approach to achieve knowledge sharing and decision synchronization in supply chains. To explore this in greater extent, we propose a decision knowledge sharing (DKS) framework based on decision and knowledge sharing in dynamic flexible supply chain environment. By exploiting DKS and flexibility in supply chain structures, better operational performance can be achieved. Considerable research efforts have been devoted to development of decision knowledge sharing framework in flexible supply chains (FSCs) environment, especially at operation levels, wherein decisions and knowledge delays have implicitly been assumed to be significant. Thus, there is need to model significant knowledge sharing delays in the decision process at the critical decision stages. In this paper, we focus on the knowledge, knowledge sharing, and decisions to study the impact of the decision flexibility, DKS and delays on the performance of the flexible supply chains. It is important because of relationship between control decisions and availability of knowledge in any DKS based FSCs. There is further a need to evolve a judicious use of decision flexibility at selected chain stages. Thus, a careful analysis of the chain with a focus on integrated decision is useful to ensure success. This paper presents this endeavor and highlights the key insights.
decision flexibility, decision knowledge sharing, flexible supply chains, knowledge management
