Leanness and Agility in a Distribution Company: A Romanian Case Study

The customer’s demands are constantly changing both in terms of variety and price range. Consequently, with the increasing number of customers, the complexity of the value perceptions is increasing as well. Nonetheless, it is generally agreed that for those who take a supply chain view, two dimensions of value often arise, namely cost savings and service enhancements. In their attempt to be both responsive and cost effective, companies adopted throughout the supply chain lean as a tactic of cost efficiency and agility as a tactic of responsiveness. There are currently known three different viewpoints regarding lean and agility adoption by enterprises: lean, agility and leagility, the proposed term when the two paradigms are allied.Lean and agile principles and practices have been widely adopted in manufacturing over the last three decades. However, their use in the warehouses, distribution centres or distribution schemes has been slower to catch on. The majority of the existent academic approaches are delimiting only theoretically the two paradigms while others are emphasizing their cohabitation, separated by a decoupling point but in parallel supply chains. Few of them address the leanness and agility cohabitation in warehousing and distribution. Moreover, to the best of the author's knowledge, no study yet researched the two paradigms beyond the decoupling point. Nonetheless, further research has to be conducted on the companies acting like intermediaries or distributors, as these enterprises are subject of lean pressures from the manufacturers and agile pressures from the retailers, resellers or final customers.Using a case-study approach this study will focus on the leanness and agility of a Romanian home improvement goods distributor of its logistic processes. In addition, the study will research the trade-off between lean and agility in the logistics activities of the company with a specific emphasis on the decoupling point, known also as the point that delimits these two conflicting supply-chain paradigms.