Factors Causing Operational Flexibility Needs in an Uncertain Business Environment
Pervez Akhtar* and Justyna Dylik **
University of Modern Languages, Islamabad Pakistan*
Warsaw School of Economics, Poland **

Abstract: Today’s business environment is more universal and aggressive than it has been in the past. The modern business is characterized by shorter product life cycles, rapid new product introductions, increasingly knowledgeable well informed and sophisticated customers, highly unpredictable and indecisive environment, short product life cycles, regular and irregular changes in demand, and global logistics issues. These uncertainties have put more pressure on companies to change and react to environmental uncertainty with improvements in their performance. Thus, manufacturing firms are expected to respond to these uncertainties efficiently to survive in the market and furthermore create competitive advantage. In other words, companies must be more flexible in future to deal with uncertain business environment.

The aim of this paper is to identify the factors which cause the need of flexibility in business operations. Another aim of this paper is to identify different types of operational flexibilities to address the uncertainties of business environment.

Keywords: Business Environment, Uncertainty, Production Operations.