Agile supply chain in the fashion industry: a literature review

For the past twenty years, there has been an increasing interest in the literature for studying the complexity and uniqueness of the fashion industry. Fashion consumers are demanding more variety, better quality and service, including both reliability and faster delivery. These pressures have brought academics and industrials to investigate new methods in order to achieve effectiveness across the fashion supply chain. As such, the concepts of agile supply chain, flexible systems, and quick response have emerged and been adopted in several ways in the fashion industry. Despite their recognitions, these concepts are often confused in the literature. To avoid those issues, this paper aims at proposing a formal framework for conducting a literature review of the agility initiatives and models developed for the fashion industry. The proposed framework identifies key dimensions related to supply chain agility.